


Shemalia

by Eresh (Eresh69420)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Anal Sex, Betrayal, Blackmail, Comedy, Dubious Consent, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fantasy, Friends to Lovers, Futa, Futanari, Gaslighting, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending, Love Triangles, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misunderstandings, Multi, Oral Sex, Orc Culture, Orcs, Other, Resolved Sexual Tension, Royalty, Sexual Abuse, Shemale, Shemales, Trans Female Character, Transgender, Treasure Hunting, Watersports
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-01-11 17:56:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 52,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18429170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eresh69420/pseuds/Eresh
Summary: In a world of high fantasy and low morality, the scion of a wealthy merchant family goes to great lengths to lose his virginity. He succeeds, though not in the way he'd originally hoped. Will he ever manage to shake off the Orc 'woman' that claimed him?Warning: Futanari, sex, and more sex. Very graphic.





	1. Something To Lose

Being of noble birth and luxurious upbringing, Elyas had always been taught to speak in a polite manner, even when referring to the more squalid things in this world. 'Brothel' instead of 'whorehouse', or 'lady of the night' instead of 'prostitute'. He had nothing against those women and the very necessary services they provided--he just never expected to be one of the men making use of them.

 

Circumstances, however, had driven him to this. The demands of his station and his family's watchful eye meant that pursuing the opposite sex in a casual manner was difficult, if not impossible. Words like 'marriage' were getting thrown around more and more, and it was looking more and more likely that he would become tied down to a woman without ever having been inside of one. He couldn't let that happen. He  _ needed _ to fuck someone.

 

Where there is a problem, there is always a solution. The most obvious one was to seek out a professional--a lady of the night. It was in pursuit of that quick fix to his aching sexual desire that he found himself in the red-velvet lobby of a city bordello, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as he waited for one of the Madames to arrive and lead him to the 'girls', as she had called them. She promised she would only be gone a few minutes, and in actuality probably  _ had _ only been gone one or two so far--but his growing anxiety made it feel like hours. He shouldn't be here, a voice in his head whispered. If someone found out, it would bring his family uncomparable shame.

 

Elyas was about to turn around and leave this place and its temptations of the flesh, when the oak doors of the front entryway swung open, and a huge figure walked in. Certainly not one of the girls, he told himself, though when she moved into the dim light of the lobby's center, he realized that she  _ was _ a woman. Not human, but certainly female. She was an orc, massive and green-skinned. Muscles and a bit of excess fat rippled beneath her leather vest, and black tribal tattoos covered her otherwise-bare arms. Her black hair was tied back in a bun, and everything below the tips of her pointed ears was shaved to a close stubble. A few strands of hair hung over her face, and she pushed them aside with an impatient grunt as she approached Elyas. Her tusked mouth was drawn down in what looked to be a permanent sneer, though he doubted it was directed at him--more just anything and everything that happened to be in her way. He stepped quickly to the side to allow her to pass, but she stopped beside him, glancing at the stairway at the other end of the room, then down to Elyas.

 

"Where is the Madame?" she grunted, her voice low enough that he could feel it through the floorboards.

 

"I'm not sure," he said quickly, a bit embarrassed over how much his own voice was trembling at this Orc's mere presence.

 

With an annoyed huff she turned back to the stairwell, and Elyas found his own eyes lingering on the awe-inspiring figure. She cut an even more imposing figure now that she was right next to him, but he could not help but notice her more feminine features alongside the bestial. The breasts straining the tensile limits of her vest, the gentle curvature of her buttocks under loose blue pants, and a chiseled face that had a dignified, matronly air about it. There was a smell, too. Elyas felt odd to be consciously appreciating the scent of a woman who looked to work as a hunter or laborer, but the odd mix of spicy sweat and fragrant sweetness was intoxicating.

 

As his eyes travelled back up her body, he noticed that she had turned her head slightly, and was staring right at him. Swallowing hard, he snapped his eyes away and stared off into space, praying that she didn't possess the usual Orc aggression or proclivity for violence. To her race, even extended eye-contact was a grievous slight to their honor.

 

"How much?" she said.

 

It took Elyas a moment to realize the words were directed at him, and not the Madame he had assumed arrived without him noticing.

 

"For the girls?" he wondered.

 

Her permanent frown deepened into a scowl. "For you," she shot back. "How much to fuck you?"

 

His first reaction was that this was some joke, but the fierce look she returned his awkward smile with told him that this was no laughing matter. Then, he realized that this Orc wasn't there to see the  _ girls. _ She was a woman, after all--it was far more likely that the brothel had men working there as well as women, and that's who she was hoping to patronize. In an ill-advised display of humor Elyas simply couldn't resist, he flashed the Orc a wry smile forged by what little confidence he could scrape together in front of the towering creature.

 

"You couldn't afford me," he said confidently.

 

"How much," she repeated, taking a step closer to him. There was a bit of threat in her voice this time, and he recalled how little these creatures appreciate humor. His first instinct was to reveal the joke, but was too terrified to risk angering her further.

 

"T-ten ducats," he stammered out. It was the first round number to come to mind, and several times that he would have to pay any of the girls here.

 

The Orc leaned in to study him, her face so close that he could feel the hot breath blowing from her nostrils. "I can buy," she said finally, grabbing his wrist and pulling him behind her as she began walking.

 

"What?" Elyas shouted, the word coming out strained as he grimaced through the pain of nearly having his arm pulled from its socket. The Orc's grip was like iron, and all he could do was move his legs as fast as possible to try and keep up. She led him into an adjoining hallway lined with dozens of identical rooms, then opened one before dragging him inside. It was just as well-decorated as the lobby, with  padded wood furniture and a spacious, canopied bed. One side of the room was separated by a carved wooden panel, creating a bath area with a large porcelain tub set against the wall. The room's purpose was clear. This was where the girls--or men--took their clients.

 

The Orc closed the door and locked it, then released his wrist before reaching to her belt and pulling off a small bag. "Ten coin." She set it down on a dresser top near the door, then walked over to the bed and sat down. The wooden frame creaked with her weight, and her dirty boots thumped down on the floor as she spread her legs out wide and leaned back. Elyas cast a furtive glance back at the locked door, every fiber of his being screaming at him to run--his aching arm being the loudest voice in the chorus.

 

"Clothes," the Orc said. Elyas turned back to see her glaring at him, her impatience visible in every line of her chiseled face. He was as scared as he'd ever been, but a new thought came to him through the heart-pounding terror. What if he went along with this? The idea made his heart pound even harder, and he found himself forced to take heaving breaths through his open mouth for fear of passing out.

 

This woman--this  _ beast-- _ was offering him ten ducats for what would undoubtedly be a quick, if violent, tumble. He had never pictured his first time being with a non-human, but he had never pictured it being in a whorehouse, either. So why not? It would certainly be an interesting memory, and this was an opportunity he might never get again. Perhaps the sheer absurdity of the situation he found himself in were the heavens telling him to seize it before it slipped away. His family was rich, but he was young enough that only a limited amount of that money went to him. With the Orc's gold in his pocket, he could come back here at least three more times without having to dip into his own limited funds. There was simply no downside.

 

"Clothes!" she barked again, breaking him from his thoughtful reverie. Elyas tore himself away from the door before he could rethink his decision, hooking his fingers under his tunic and pulling it free before dropping it to the floor. Next came his shoes, and then--much more slowly and hesitantly--his pants. By the time he came within a few feet of his 'client', he was down to his underwear. She was still fully dressed, leaving him feeling even more naked than his near-nudity implied. The Orc's withering gaze was as intense as ever, but something about the way her eyes moved across his naked flesh told him she liked what she saw.

 

"Start," she said simply. Elyas froze, going even more rigid than he had been. Lovemaking with a human woman of gentle demeanor would have been nerve-wracking enough, but he was dealing with a woman whose presence was so dominating he could scarcely believe. And  _ she  _ expected  _ him  _ to take the lead.

 

Stepping carefully, as if he was approaching some snarling animal, Elyas moved forward until he was standing between her legs, then leaned forward, closing his eyes just before their mouths met. His lips pressed into hers, working gently across warm flesh and hard tusks. His first kiss long ago had been awkward, but this blew that out of the water. The Orc's own lips did nothing, and after a few moments moved away. He opened his eyes to see her staring at him with a look of utter shock, and was gripped with the very real fear that he was about to have the life throttled out of him for a reason he didn't even know.

 

"Sorry," he muttered uneasily, taking a step back. That seemed to break her from her bewilderment, and she leaned towards him again, grabbing his wrist and pulling him forward so hard he nearly fell right into her lap.

 

"Again." She put her face within inches of his, and waited patiently as he once again planted a kiss on her mouth. This time hers moved in time with his, plump lips seeming to swallow up his smaller ones and tickling tusks raked up and down his cheek with each change in angle of her head. Their tongues began to play with each other, but Elyas' was quickly overpowered by the Orc's. Like its owner, it was larger and stronger. She thrust it into his mouth, grabbing him by the back of the head and driving it so far back he thought he might gag. In panic and breathlessness he pushed back on the Orc's broad shoulders, but she didn't release him until he began to slap at her.

 

The Orc looked upset, but her anger softened when he brought his hands inward and rested them on her chest just above her ample cleavage. She wound her fingers up in his hair, moving his head gently and staring at him as if considering what to do next. Elyas' fear of the woman remained, but that fear had become so tainted with thoughts of lust that he no longer had any thought of stopping her, no matter what she did. He was standing on the edge of a cliff, and felt an overwhelming urge to jump.

 

"I'm Azug," she grunted. "You?"

 

"Elyas," he replied quickly, before better sense could prevent him from revealing his real identity within the confines of a brothel. Still, it was a common enough name, and hardly enough to identify his high status. Azug let out a low, thoughtful rumble, then released her hold on his hair and put her hands back on the bed. Elyas quickly realized that she was again waiting for him to take the lead, though he couldn't imagine what to do next--until his eyes fell on her heaving breasts, fleshy mounds of green that looked ready to pop free of the leather strands criss-crossing the two halves of her vest. He reached out slowly, giving her plenty of time to stop him or otherwise make her objections known without undue physical force. But she made no movements, and he untied the long leather string at the top of her vest, loosening it enough to introduce some slack to the whole garment. She held her arms out and leaned forward, allowing Elyas to pull it over her head.

 

When she sat back again, her torso was bare and her sizable breasts hung free. A soft layer of fat covered her body, though the massive muscles underneath were plenty visible. There was a pleasant plumpness to her that Elyas wanted to wrap his much-smaller arms around.

 

"You're really beautiful," he muttered. He hadn't really meant to say anything, but felt that something needed to be said to mark the occasion of seeing his first nude woman--and he meant those words, too. When he looked up from Azug's light-green areolas, she was grinning at him. It was a mean smile, though he detected no true malevolence behind it. Her tusks and generally brutish appearance just didn't allow her to present a gentle or inviting front.

 

"How? Say more." She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him close, and Elyas swore a silent wish that she would realize how fragile he was compared to her. He would prefer to leave this room with an intact pelvis, if possible.

 

"I don't--" Elyas stammered, wanting to tell her he was unsure of how to express his fascination with her body. But he knew he should at least try.

 

"You're... soft," he said uneasily, holding his hands just above her shoulders.

 

Azug glared at him, her face nearly level with his despite the fact that she was sitting and he was standing.

 

"Soft?" she snapped, clearly offended by the implication that a proud Orc could be anything but tough as steel.

 

"I mean you  _ look _ soft," he added hurriedly. "Like you'd be nice to touch." He swallowed the lump in his throat, still weary of laying hands on anything but her shoulders and upper chest. "Can I touch you?"

 

Azug grunted in answer, and Elyas prayed that meant 'yes' as his hands settled onto her shoulders and drew slowly down to her tits. Hard flesh became soft, and he gasped at the warmth emanating from her chest. Before he knew what he was doing he was kneading them between his fingers, feeling her supple breasts roll beneath his ministrations. With the ecstatic softness in his hands driving him wild with lust, the cock between his legs became harder, swelling with blood and forcing him to turn his knees inward and drawing his buttocks back to avoid the Orc spotting the obscene tenting of his underwear.

 

But all that worry was for naught. She grabbed his entire package in the spacious grip of one hand, squeezing and rubbing with such force that he had to lean forward further to keep from being pushed back. Her strong fingers caught his balls in their grip more than a few times, drawing painful grunts from Elyas. If Azug noticed, she didn't care--her eyes were fixed on his, her nostrils flaring with a lust that outmatched his own. Her other hand wrapped around the small of his back, holding him in place as she clumsily groped at his manhood. She stopped feeling his hard cock, hooking one finger into the waistline of his underwear and pulling them down far enough that he could kick them off his feet.

 

Then she resumed her rubbing, and the hand on his back slid down to his buttcheeks, squeezing and kneading them just as he was doing to her breasts. That felt a little strange, but wasn't serious cause for alarm until one of Azug's fingers slipped in between his cheeks and began probing at his back door.

 

"What are you doing?" he gasped out, shuffling forward to get away from the intruder. But there was nowhere to run--two more steps had his shins hitting the edge of the bed, and Azug's hand follow him the whole way. He was stuck between a rock and hard place, an immovable mountain of a woman in front of him, and an insistent finger behind him. The pressure grew and grew until she slipped through his weakened defenses, drawing another gasp from him and forcing him to wrap his arms around her head to keep his trembling legs from giving out completely.

 

Azug abandoned all pretense of pleasuring his cock, instead moving the hand she had been fondling it with to help hold his cheeks apart while she drove her finger deeper. They were both sweaty from the heat of the room and their joined bodies--her more than him--and that slickness helped her entry somewhat, though the thickness of her digit meant her fingering was never going to be a painless intrusion. He squeezed his eyes shut and gripped her head tightly, too wracked with pain and a sense of violation to worry about what reaction she might have to him clinging to her like this. Her finger was thick, but it was also long--long enough to poke at something deep inside of him, sending a jolt of electricity shooting from his groin to the base of his skull.

 

Elyas shouted in ecstatic surprise, his eyes shooting wide and his muscles tensing as his hard cock twitched against Azug's sweaty chest. She let out a low laugh and repeated the motion, turning Elyas into a spasming mess that barely managed to stay standing as this strange new pleasure overtook him in crashing waves.

 

"You like?" she said.

 

He didn't respond. He  _ couldn't _ respond. All he could do was lean against her and stick his buttocks out towards her hand, encouraging her to press deeper. Any thoughts of how vile or wrong this was went right out the window, replaced by the simple desire for more of this feeling. It felt as if he were cumming without end, a constant dribble of precum spilling out the head of his cock and being smeared between the Orc's tits. A second finger pressed into his already stretched rear, and this time he wasn't sure he even wanted to object. He did his best to relax, allowing her to shove another digit in alongside the first. Both fingers wiggled back and forth, opening him up as she poked that button inside of him and over. Her lips kissed at the arousal-hardened nipple he had pressed up against her face, and her tongue ran circles around it before she took it in between her teeth and bit down just hard enough that he thought she might draw blood.

 

The strange new sensations were all too much, and Elyas moaned in pleasure as he came buckets, grinding himself against Azug's chest as rope after rope of cum was coaxed from his aching cock by her fingering of his prostate. He squeezed his eyes shut, his senses dominated by the spicy scent of her sweat and hair, and the Orc's frantic breathing that drowned out all other noise except the pounding of his own heart in his ears.

 

When at last he had been milked dry, Elyas' legs were no longer working. Azug plucked her fingers from his ravaged ass and leaned back, allowing him to collapse onto her chest, earning himself a cheek full of his own cum. He grimaced in disgust and tried to pull back, but Azug's hand went to the back of his neck, keeping him close.

 

"Clean me." She dragged a finger in between the folds of muscle and fat of her abdomen, gathering up a dollop of his seed before thrusting it into his mouth. It was salty and bitter enough that the horrid taste snapped him out of whatever sexual spell the Orc had put him under. But she was far stronger, and he was unable to resist her forcing it deep enough that he gagged, allowing the cum to slip down his throat. An amused rumble shook the Orc's massive form, and she grabbed his arm while her other hand remained nearly fully wrapped around his small neck.

 

"All of it," she said. "Then you take my pants off."

 

Elyas swallowed, tasting his cum all over again. His face was close enough to her crotch that the scent of her sex toyed with his nostrils, making his eyes flutter and arms tremble--it was like nothing he had ever smelled before. A confusing mix of masculine and feminine, of musky and fragrant, alluring and repellant. He wanted to bury his face into her pussy and taste her--but he couldn't do that until he did what she asked. She was the client, after all. And he couldn't bear to end this encounter with a mere titjob. Nor would the Orc herself be satisfied without having gotten off at all.

 

Forcing his tongue out through his pursed lips, Elyas closed his eyes and pressed his face between her breasts, gathering up the accumulated cum and sweat before drawing it back into his mouth. It was no more pleasant the second time, and only grew less so as he moved downward, digging his tongue into the folds of her belly and giving the filthy Orc a full-body tongue bath. It must have tickled her despite the thickness of her hide, since she was twitching and letting out deep laughs the entire entire time he cleaned her. As she came to realize he wasn't going to pull away she released him, allowing him full room to maneuver as he worked his way up and down, from side to side. The sickness he felt welling up within him subsided, overshadowed by the knowledge that he was bringing this woman pleasure--him, who had never been with a woman before. The means may have been bizarre and perverse, but he felt a need to drive her to greater heights of ecstasy like she had him.

 

After a few minutes, he found that he was running his tongue across nothing but clean, smooth flesh. All the white he had painted her green skin with was now inside of him, a fact that the Orc recognized and which had a devilish grin plastered across her face.

 

"My boots," she said, holding her legs up on either side of him. Elyas broke himself from his daze, finally having reached the point he'd been waiting for. All of the abuse and humiliation would be worth it if he could bury his face--and then, his cock--in that pussy. As he moved away and grabbed onto her left boot, he saw that a massive wet spot had formed on the crotch of her pants. She was as ready for this as he was. With his heart pounding and cock hardening again despite having cum only minutes ago, he tore off both of her shoes, then grabbed onto the ankles of her pants. Azug bucked and bounced on the bed, making it creak terribly as she gave him room to slide her pants off. He resisted the urge to bury his face in that stain of womanly fluids and tossed the pants aside, then hurried forward on all fours towards what awaited him between her legs.

 

Except what awaited him was not at all what he expected. She wore underwear of dark leather, made darker by the bodily fluids that had soaked clean through it. And what it contained was not the subtle ripples of an Orc's vulva, but a massive bulge twice the size of his own fist. He had hurried towards her too fast and too eagerly, and was close enough that it nearly filled his vision. The Orc's scent was more powerful than ever, a cloying musk that made him feel drunk beyond belief. Elyas wanted to ask what this was she had put in front of him, but the outline faintly visible beneath the stretched leather made it abundantly clear. She had a cock and balls, both of absurd dimensions that would be comical if they weren't so threateningly placed inches from his face.

 

Before he could move or speak, muscular thighs squeezed his head and pulled it into her groin. Face met wet leather, and he groaned in disgust at the musky precum being smeared over his lips and nostrils.

 

"You like?" said the Orc, seemingly oblivious to the desperate slaps he was giving the underside of her thighs. He could barely keep his eyes open, and not just because they were being mashed with such great force into her package. The scent that had seemed so tempting before was now utterly overpowering, a demanding thing that kept him pressed to her just as surely as the thighs wrapped around his neck. He felt his lips moving against the wet leather, as if he was trying to speak without meaning to--but no, he was licking. Seeking out that scent that he knew would taste as depravely seductive as it smelled. His stomach roiled at the first taste of her precum on his tongue, but some feverish need within him shouted over any rational objections, telling him to lick and suck and taste until the inside of his mouth was covered with her.

 

Elyas moaned and drooled into her, his hands no longer slapping and instead wrapping around her thighs to keep himself locked tight to that obscene bulge. Once as soft as her breasts, it was now growing harder. He could make out clearly now the separation between her balls and dick, as well as the more subtle indentations of her bulbous head. Desperate to get closer to the source of that sweet scent and sweeter taste, he tried to slip his tongue in through the side of her underwear. His tongue slipped over coarse pubic hair, tasting foul sweat before making contact with the veiny base of her still-limp cock.

 

But only for a moment. Azug opened her legs, relieving the pressure on his neck at the same moment she grabbed the top of his head and pushed him away from her crotch. Elyas resisted, panting and breathless, but couldn't hope to match her strength. All he could do was look from her face to her cock with his mouth hung open like a drooling idiot. Then, Azug begin plucking at the sides of her waist, first one then the other. She undid the leather straps keeping her loincloth in place, allowing the front of it to fall down. What fell with it was what Elyas fully expected, but that expectation had not prepared him for the reality.

 

Her cock unrolled like a spool of rope, a thick green thing the size of his forearm that hung halfway to the floor, even while soft. Her balls dropped next, pendulous orbs that took a moment to peel free of the sticky underside of her shaft. Precum poured from her cock in a continuous stream, connecting the head to the floor beneath her with a single clear strand that had Elyas drooling all the faster. Azug took her hand away from his head, and Elyas shot forward to put his face back where it had been before she had so cruelly torn him away. He ducked down low, preparing to put his lips over that dangling head.

 

Then, he stopped. Reason broke through the fog of unnatural need that had gripped him, and he found himself recoiling at the sight in front of him. Her cock was filthy, covered in dried cum and curly pubic hairs stuck there by the precum that had gathered in her loincloth. The smell which had seemed so seductive took on a darker tone, and he gagged at the taste in his mouth. The emotions and sensations gripping him were beyond intense, and completely opposed to each other. He was disgusted by himself and what lay in front of him, but at the same time gripped by a bone-deep need to take her inside of him. He had never touched a cock besides his own, and had never lay with a woman. Now, he was about to make his first memory of real sex that of him taking an Orc's filthy green meat into his mouth like the whore he was pretending to be.

 

Azug grunted in annoyance at the delay, feeling none of the trepidation that had gripped Elyas. She lifted up her length and, as Elyas looked up to see what she was doing with it, dropped it onto his face. He froze up in shock, her dick spilling precum into his hair as her balls dangles just below his chin. It nearly covered his vision, and the rank scent of Orc body odor filled his nostrils completely. He alternated between taking breaths in through his nose and mouth, smelling and tasting her in equal measure. Each intake of air seemed to suffocate the worry he felt, and he no longer knew why he had hesitated in the first place. He ran his tongue from the top of her ballsack to the base of her shaft, cleaning the wrinkled cleft between the two as he reached above his head to grip her shaft. With her cock firmly in hand he drew back, running his tongue along her length until he had reached her head. Then, he stuck it into her piss slit, flicking at the source of that fluid sweeter than any fruit and more intoxicating than any liquor. With both hands gripping her shaft he drew back her sticky foreskin, fully exposing the light-green head of her cock. The scent was unreal, and he feared he might collapse then and there before he ever got a chance to take her inside of his mouth.

 

But no matter how much he needed her inside of him, there were physical difficulties that would be encountered no matter how much whorish enthusiasm he dove onto her length with. The first inch or two of her head slipped into his mouth easily, but everything after that was a struggle. Even half-hard, her meaty length was simply too thick to pass easily between his teeth--and she was only growing harder. Eager to fit as much of her into him as he could manage before her rigidity rendered such a task impossible, he gripped her shaft and shoved himself onto it, twisting his head from side to side, choking and gagging as he ignored the rising sickness in his stomach from having his tonsils so rudely violated. Precum spilled over his tongue, coated the inside of his mouth, and flowing into his stomach almost as fast as he could swallow. His jaw ached and throat protested against the invader, but it was only the sheer impossibility of further insertion that stopped him from going further.

 

That didn't, however, stop Azug.

 

"More," she grunted, wrapping her hand around his and his cock simultaneously, then grabbing the back of his head before attempting to jam more her length down his throat. Elyas choked and gurgled, eyes filling with tears and lungs burning as her battering made breathing difficult, if not impossible. To his utter disbelief, he could feel more of her cock being fed into him, fractions of an inch sinking past his lips with each buck of her hips into his mouth. Her cock was hard enough that he could no longer simply slide it in, and had to angle his head to allow her to force it deeper instead of simply battering away at the back of his throat.

 

Only then did he realize how much of her cock remained to be thrust into him. Her bushy crotch looked impossibly far away, and her swinging balls were nowhere near his chin. His head was dipped low to the floor, and pointed up to allow her downward-pointed cock to be inserted into him. But the size and her hardness made it impossible, leaving him feeling as if he were about to be skewered alive. Azug never truly let up pressure, instead only briefly allowing him to pull back before fucking his mouth back onto her length. They fell into a rhythm like that, an increasingly delirious Elyas gagging on her cock as Azug herself swore in some bestial language while running one hand up and down her length, occasionally smacking it right into his face. His world was beginning to turn black and quiet, when a new sensation appeared. Azug's cock twitched and throbbed, spewing liquid down his throat that came hotter and faster than everything that came before it. It was thicker, too, and he found himself unable to swallow this fresh deluge of precum fast enough.

 

But then, he tasted it, and realized it wasn't precum. Azug was orgasming, her feet thumping against the floor like jackhammers and her hand gripping his head tighter than ever as she pumped load after load into him. His cheeks bloated absurdly, but very little of her jizz escaped out the corners of his mouth--his lip were simply stretched too taut to allow that. The vast majority was forced down his throat by simple virtue of that being the only course it could take, flowing into a stomach that felt increasingly full. Elyas gave up on trying to push away from the salty spew and held a hand to his aching gut, eyes going wide as he felt his gut palpably distend from the size of her load. A strange warmth washed over him from his belly outward, taking his oxygen-deprived brain to new heights of sensation too powerful to be called pleasant or unpleasant.

 

Just as the blackness seemed to be in danger of overtaking his vision completely, the throbbing of Azug's cock ceased and her spewing died down to a slow trickle. She released the back of his head and then shoved him off her cock, allowing it to pop free in a splatter of Orc seed that covered his face as much more spilled down his chin in a fight of coughing. Even though he was free of her immense length, it took several seconds to clear his throat of enough of the thick semen to draw breath. He no longer had any conception of where he was or what he was doing, and only knew that he felt satisfied beyond measure with his stomach so wonderfully full of that intoxicating liquid.

 

Before Elyas could even recover enough to lift himself off pf the floor, Azug hooked a hand under his armpit, hauling him up and tossing him face-down onto the bed. It was soft and inviting, and he wanted nothing more than to lay there while recovering from his rough treatment.

 

That is, until he felt the bed shake as Azug crawled on top of him, slamming one fist down beside his head as her other hand guided her cock to his barely-prepared ass. The cum-covered length slid between his butt cheeks, making them slick and making it very clear to Elyas that he needed to do something to avoid having his ass torn so badly he'd never go back to normal.

 

"Wait!" He tried to spin around to face her, but Azug's looming bulk made movements impossible. She grunted in annoyance at his objection, but stopped trying to fuck him for a moment.

 

"Wanna make fuck," she said. "Running out of time."

 

Elyas forced a smile and looked up at her. "We can take as long as you want! Let's go slow."

 

Azug eyed him suspiciously. "No big charge?"

 

Elyas had nearly forgotten what got him into this situation in the first place. "No charge," he responded quickly. "All the time you want!"

 

Apparently satisfied with that verbal guarantee, Azut rolled off of him and climbed up the bed on all fours, then spun around and slumped down with her back lounging against the headboard and pillows. She stared at Elyas, and he hurriedly followed, clambering onto her body without a hint of hesitation. He was far beyond worrying about what this Orc might do to him. His stomach ached and sloshed in ithh eafh movement, the aching fullness a small preview of what awaited him if he let her do the same to his ass.

 

Azug dragged him up the rest of the way, resting him in the crook of her arm. Bushy armpit hair tickled his shoulder, and the musky scent of sweat was no less powerful up there than it had been with his face buried in her crotch. She pulled his face towards hers, snaking her tongue into his mouth and crashing their lips together in an animalistic display of passion. Her other hand cradles his buttocks, fingers playing at his stretched asshole before slipping inside, aided by sweat and the pungent precum that she seemed to have covered every inch of his body with.

 

Strangely, Elyas didn't mind what she was doing to his rear. He felt as if he should, or ought to, but those thoughts evaporated the deeper her tongue sank into his mouth and the more her rumbling grunts echoed through his body. He felt wanted, needed, dominated--Azug had made him take the lead at first, but now he was being led along by an invisible collar of drunken lust unlike anything he could have imagined. Eyes fluttering open and closed in the throes of her passionate tongue-fucking, he ran his hand down her belly and sought out the massive length he knew lay somewhere nearby. It did not take him long to find it. She was still rock hard, and the head of her cock lay well past her belly button. More surprising than that was how much precum still oozed from a dick that had just come buckets down his throat. The slippery fluid made it easy for him to run his hand up and down her shaft, pumping her meaty foreskin up and down and appreciating how right her throbbing length felt in his grip. Azug bucked into his grip and worked more of her fingers inside him, spreading them wide to open him up further. He was sure she would have forced her whole hand in if their positions had allowed it.

 

Azug grunted and tensed, her abdomen going rigid under him as she prepared to cum again--but he couldn't let that happen, not yet. He pulled back from their kiss, a task made difficult by the strong hand on the back of his head that seemed determined to keep him there until the end of time. She grunted in annoyance as he released her cock and pushed up from her, but then her expression softened at the sight of his own face, which was so clearly overtaken by blatant desire.

 

"Azug," he murmured, his voice trembling as much as his tired arms as he looked into her deep green eyes. "Can you put it inside me?"

 

What followed was not a  _ spoken _ acknowledgement, but the speed and power with which she picked him up and threw him face-down on the bed made her own desire very clear. She maneuvered on top of him, hot breath caressing the back of his neck and breasts cradling either side of his head as her cock slid in between his buttcheeks, spilling precum across the small of his back.

 

"Please go slow!" he shouted, his hearing muffled by the sweaty tits pressed into his ears. "I'm new to this!"

 

Elyas may have been taken enough by this Orc's scent and power to give up his ass to her, but he maintained enough scraps of good sense to keep in mind how big her cock was and how small his ass was. And for all  _ she _ knew, he was a seasoned professional who was used to taking such things up the rear--not an unsoiled virgin.

 

"New to Orc?" Azug grunted, resting her forehead on the bed to peer down at him.

 

He shook his head, blinking the tears from his eyes as he did so. His body and mind screamed out for the woman pressing into him, but he couldn't help but admit some fear as to what was to come.

 

"I've never been..." He swallowed hard, gathering up the will to say it aloud. "Fucked before."

 

Azug blinked a few times as if processing the words, then gave him a toothy grin. "You gonna like me." She shifted downward, laying her weight on top of him as she kissed and licked all over the left side of his face. "Gonna fuck good."

 

Elyas didn't doubt that last guarantee. His worry was that he'd bit off more than he could chew. He'd come here to fuck a woman--a  _ normal _ woman--not to get fucked up the ass by a well-muscled Orc two heads taller than him. Yet here he was, moaning underneath her long tongue and grinding his buttocks against her hard shaft. Fleeing now would have been impossible, but even with the trepidation he felt, he gave no thought to the closed door behind him. It was a rapturous fear, as much a part of his pleasure as Azug's soft weight and heady scent.

 

Her kissing mouth worked its way down his neck and back, and he felt the bed shift as she nearly scooted off of him entirely. Her hands spread his buttocks, exposing his winking anus to the warm as moments before she dove onto it, lapping wildly with her tongue as her fingers dug inside to spread it further. Elyas shot upright, his mouth spreading into a stupid grin as he let out a slight laugh that quickly changed to a warbling groan. Her tongue dove impossibly deep into him, circling and probing until she once again pressed that button inside him, making his spent cock jerk back to life.

 

The feeling of being eaten alive from the inside out by this Orc was unlike any other, but through the delightful pleasure came a new need that he couldn't put into words until he felt her cum sloshing around inside of his stomach. He didn't know why, but he _had_ to have her to fill him with more of her seed. It wasn't a perverse desire, or an idle want--it was a deep-seated need, as fundamental as breathing or eating.

 

"Azug." He breathed her name over and over like a prayer, grasping at the head buried in his rear in an attempt to get her attention. She had two fingers from each hand hooked into his entrance to spread it wide for her tongue, but the throbbing pain he felt was an impossibly distant cry. After a few moments he got her attention, and her gaze snapped up to his like a woman possessed.

 

"Please fuck me," he said without a hint of shame about what he was asking her to do. Friends, family, societal obligations--all that seemed so small compared with the demanding enormity of this Orc. She pushed herself up on bundled fists and lumbered back into position, then used one hand to angle her leaking cock towards his well-prepared rear. Short, powerful jabs drove her cock into his buttocks, thigh, and lower back, until finally one thrust landed home. A few inches of her glans sunk into his swollen rear, filling his rectum even before the head was all the way in.

 

Elyas cried out from a fiery sensation too pure and hot to be called pain, winding his fingers up in the bedding and clenching his teeth as every muscle in his body went rigid. But even with his body turning to stone, he had little defense against the weight and strength of the Orc determined to bury her dick inside of him. He begged for her to go slow, his pleading turning to incoherent mumbling and wails as inch after inch of her increasingly thick rod worked its way into him. There was no going back now, only forward--and that looked to be a longer road then he thought. No matter how deep he felt her cock probing or how much his ass screamed in protest, it kept coming. For a time it seemed like it might never end.

 

Then Azug did stop, but not because she had hilted herself in him. Far from it. She grunted in desire and impatience, giving powerful jabs with her cock that hit some impassable wall within him and produced fresh cries of confused pleasure and discomfort. No matter how badly she tore through him or how irresponsibly deep her cock sank, the enormity of her tool put a constant pressure on his prostate that drowned out all other sensations with a constant seizure of tingling pleasure. 

 

Orcs were not generally known for their patience, and Azug was no different. With a bellow that rattled his brain in his skull she pulled back, then drove forward with an irresistible force that battered right through his defenses. White light filled his vision and bells rang in his ears as more and more of her length sailed into his straightened colon, his ruined asshole now unable to offer any resistance whatsoever. His mouth hung open and eyes shot wide in shock, but there was nothing to do except revel in the twisted pleasure of what she was doing to his insides. He could feel the head of her cock press into his abdomen from the inside, pushing upward and making abundantly clear just exactly how deep inside of him she was.

 

By the time her meaty hips sank into his buttocks and her balls mashed into his, she was just past his belly button. He felt as if he'd been split in two, torn asunder so thoroughly that neither time nor doctors could put him back together. His lips moved rapidly as he drew his face into the bed, but no words came forth. Nor did any coherent thoughts form in his brain--just flashes of sensation that he could hardly wrap his musk-addled mind around.

 

No sooner had Azug hilted herself in him than he felt her begin to pull out, his anus retaining just enough strength that he was nearly pulled with her.

 

"Slow!" he murmured over and over, though he couldn't lift his bleary face from the covers long enough to truly make his wishes known.

 

"Was slow," Azug said with a dark chuckle. "We fakka-fakka now." She leaned one hand on the back of his head, pinning him to the bed as she withdrew her length. Then she eased back into him, sawing six inches of arm-thick Orc cock into his rear. To her credit, she was still going slow--but that only made the experience excruciating instead of outright injurious. His colon was straightened out all over again, and his insides felt as bruised as the entrance she had forced open to an impossible diameter.

 

From there, her movements only became faster and harder. All pretense of foreplay was gone, and she shoved his face down into the bed while slamming her hips into his ass over and over, each time pulling out a little further and driving in a little deeper. His stomach roiled in protest, the thick seed inside of him rising up his throat as a sickening bile. She slammed into him hard and he coughed, spewing white cum out onto the blanket. Azug bellowed in laughter and slowed her fucking just enough that she could hunch over and deliver slobbering kisses all over the side of his face, in a bizarrely affectionate display that brought him a small bit of comfort in between the gut-wrenching bodyslams turning his insides to mush.

 

Elyas lay there like a man near-death, his only movements the spasms produced by Azug's fucking. All of the second thoughts and worries he should have considered earlier flooded his mind, and with his the few wits that hadn't yet been fucked out of him he cursed himself for his curiosity. When he had come to this brothel, his worst concern had been the social embarrassment of being seen by someone he knew. Now, his biggest fear was a physical one--and lodged firmly up his ass. He would have endured all the shame in the world if it meant being saved from what felt like certain maiming at the hands of this rutting Orc.

 

"You tight," Azug grunted, laying her full weight on him and spreading all four of her limbs out wide. Her body covered his completely, wrapping him up in green muscle and sweaty softness. She wrapped her hands around his, easily engulfing them in her massive paws.

 

"And pretty," she added breathily, angling her head awkwardly so as to allow her tongue entrance to his mouth. With great effort Elyas lifted his head up to meet her kiss, desperate for her to unload inside of him. It would mean an end this to abuse, but it would also give him more of the hot cum he had sought since he first her juices from her precum-soaked leathers. Even now, amidst the pain and discomfort, he needed her seed.

 

Azug's thrusting had gone from shallow and slow to deep and furious, but now she adopted a new pace, jabbing into him with short, frenzied thrusts that made his entire body feel like jelly. She let go of his hands and wrapped her arms around his head, cradling him in between her breasts and cutting him off from the outside world. There was no more light, and the only sound that reached him were the bestial grunts coming from the Orc above him. Her belly rolled and shook against his back and she thrust deeper than ever before, as if trying to jam her pendulous balls in alongside her cock. She roared, a terrifying bellow that pierced Elyas' ears even through the flesh tits pressed up against his ears. Her cock throbbed and her balls pulled tight as an all-too-familiar warmth appeared deep inside of him, spreading out from his core and putting a frightening pressure on his insides. Even with Azug's seething bulk laying on top of him, he swore he could feel his own distending abdomen pushing himself upward. There were no distinct shots of semen being pumped into him, just a continuous flow that went on and on until the fullness threatened to make him sick.

 

Elyas cried out and slapped at Azug's breasts and shoulders, and to his great relief she rolled off of him, though that relief vanished when he realized she was not even close to done. She wrapped her arms around his chest and held him tight, continuing to fuck into him as they both lay on their sides, him the much smaller spoon even if his belly was bloated far beyond its usual size. He coughed and gagged, and more thick white cum spilled out of his mouth and sprayed onto the bed. He prayed it was what she deposited down his throat, and not the overflow of what was being shot up his ass.

 

With the return of his hearing came a dull roar in his ears, and he was somewhat relieved to find that it was Azug's frantic panting, and not the sound of fluid rushing into him. Her powerful arms threatened to crush his ribcage in addition to every other injury she had inflicted on him, and he had to summon the last bits of strength within him to pull back on her wrists and allow his oxygen-deprived lungs room to inflate. One of her hands left his chest, sliding down to his stomach and rubbing all over the obscene bulge as if admiring the pregnancy of a woman weeks away from giving birth. Once he was able to breath properly, enough of Elyas' panic abated that he could appreciate the rapturous warmth and sense of fulfillment washing over his body. His cock was rock hard and he felt ready to burst--both his stomach and his member--but being so full of this Orc's cum was too exultant a feeling to worry about his own need for release. That need felt so small and far away as he lay in Azug's arms, moaning against the last of her feverish thrusts into him. When her cock finally stopped throbbing and her balls ran dry she ceased thrusting, but did not pull out.

 

Instead, Azug grabbed his left leg, angling it upwards and heaving herself onto her knees, all while keeping her softening length buried deep inside of him. The contortions she put him through were made quite awkward and painful by the size of his stomach, and he let out more than a few pained grunts as she maneuvered herself into a kneeling position with his legs propped spread across her broad, meaty hips. Her gaze was fixed on his stomach and she ran both hands over it, grinning wickedly all the while.

 

"You pregnant," she said, applying enough pressure that Elyas had to grab her wrists to discourage her from forcing her seed out of him. He wasn't sure which end it would come out of, seeing as how thoroughly his rear was still plugged.

 

"I can't get pregnant," he grunted.

 

She let out a rumbling laugh and leaned over him, testing the limits of his hip mobility. "I know. Why I fuck men." Her lips pressed against his and her tongue slipped into his mouth, an intrusion that Elyas couldn't help but enthusiastically welcome. Her hair bun had come loose somewhere in the throes of brutal fucking, and her locks created a dark veil on either side of his head that left him unable to see anything except those half-open green eyes burning into his. As they kissed she moved one hand from his belly to his cock and clumsily jerked him with her calloused hand. By all rights it should have been the least pleasurable handjob possible, but he had been pushed so close to the edge by her abuse of his prostate that he came after only a few strokes. It was a weak orgasm, and he didn't have much of a load left to shoot--certainly a fraction of Azug's--but that release had him letting out a satisfied sigh into her mouth and grasping the sides of her face. She pulled back from their kiss, resting her forehead on his and panting hot breath onto him for a time before sitting up. Then she scooted back on the bed, gripping the base of her cock with one hand and using the other to keep Elyas in place. She had grown softer, but the precum that had served as lube had dried, making her withdrawal a painful experience that had him feeling as if his insides might come out with her.

 

Luckily, that fear did not come to pass. What  _ did _ come out was a torrent of hot, pungent semen that soaked the bed and had the room stinking of rank sex even more than it already was. Azug pushed Elyas' legs flat, and then shuffled over his swollen abdomen until her knees lay on either side of his neck and her hairy balls were draped across his jawline. She draped her cum-covered cock across his face, an evil smile playing on her own as she watched his nostrils flare and eyes flutter.

 

"You gonna clean me, human?" she asked. It may have been phrased as a question, but she gave him no time to answer before taking her glans and forcing it past his lips. Elyas sucked eagerly, locking his lips tight and pulling his cheeks inward as he drew out the last drops of seed remaining within her slit. The fact that he was suckling on a cock that had just been tickling at his stomach should have filled him with revulsion, but he had crossed a lot of lines in the last few hours, and could think of no reason to stop here. Nor did he want to. He wanted to do whatever this Orc asked of him. Better still, he wanted  _ her _ to do whatever she wanted to him, without asking at all.

 

Azug yanked her head free with a soft  _ 'pop' _ and then waved her flaccid length from side to side over his face, smearing it with her juices as he angled his face from side to side, chasing the meat with his tongue. She laughed again and stopped teasing him, instead using her hands to aid him in his quest to lick up and down her flexible length until every bulging vein was spit-shined. Finally satisfied, Azug leaned backwards and heaved a tired sigh that Elyas would have echoed if her cock weren't still laying across his lips.

 

"We take as long as I want?" Azug wondered up at the ceiling, echoing Elyas' earlier words when he had begged her to take things slow. Elyas mumbled an acknowledgement, made difficult by her cock head dipping into his mouth the moment he tried to speak. Chest still heaving with the effort she had put into plowing him, Azug held up a hand with her fingers spread wide. Elyas had no idea what she was indicating until she spoke.

 

"Five minutes," she said. "Then we fakka-fakka again."

  
  
  



	2. Kidnapped

Throughout the course of one's life, one will meet many people that they fully expect never to meet again. They will also encounter individuals whom they  _ hope  _ never to meet again. In Elyas' case, the certainty of the former seemed so unquestionable that he gave no thought to the latter.

 

It had been a month since he'd been fucked by a shemale Orc twice his size in body and thrice his size in masculine endowment. The encounter was so ridiculous, so unlike him, that he would have brushed it off as a fever dream if his ass wasn't still throbbing as a constant reminder of what had been done to it.

 

The first day he had come home, he'd reeked of Orc spunk and looked nine months pregnant. His clothes had gone straight into a fire, but even hours of bathing and scrubbing failed to get her scent out of his skin. To keep any of his family's servants from noticing his swollen belly, he had to stay in his bedroom behind a locked door until he had finally expelled the last of her seed. The comment the Orc had made about not fucking women for fear of getting them pregnant was not a joke, he realized. If he were a woman, he surely would have been impregnated a dozen times over.

 

For the next week, he had been unable to sit without making a huge production of grimacing and swearing as he eased himself down. Someone had noticed, and suggested the possibility of hemorrhoids. He had brushed them off with assurances that he'd been thrown off of a horse some days before.

 

A month came and went, and his asshole still hasn't regained its former tautness. He had gone to that brothel expecting to give his virginity to a woman with a warm pussy, but instead had it torn from him by a brute wielding a cock of gargantuan proportions. Was this his punishment for seeking to indulge in sins of the flesh?

 

If that were so, then all he could do was turn his mind to purer, less sultry matters. Things like the family business, and the dry affairs that plagued an influential merchant family to no end. It worked, for a time. The intense dedication with which he dove into taking up the family mantle occupied his mind, even if it could not help his body recover more quickly. He was sure he would never meet that Orc-Azug-again. After all, their worlds could not be anymore different. Why would she, a crude woman of poor appearance and poorer conduct, ever set foot near his family's gilded halls?

 

That was exactly what he asked himself when she first strode into a conference room inside his manor, standing amidst the stone and wood alongside three other Orcs-all of them women. Whether the others were endowed like her, he couldn't venture a guess. He was too busy staring at her stupidly while his lips moved in silent disbelief.

 

"As I was saying," the family steward continued. "The contraction of the markets has forced some cuts in your spending." He threw a glance at the line of four creatures and winced. "These...  _ colorful  _ creatures came much more cheaply than human guards. Time will tell whether they are up to the task of watching over our interests."

 

The old man nearly shouted that last bit from his seat beside him at the long table, clearly wanting to make his doubts known to the new hires. Three of the Orcs were staring straight ahead in rapt attention, but Azug wasn't. Her wide eyes were fixed straight on Elyas', and she seemed to be gripped by some fraction of the shock that had rendered him silent. She tore her eyes away and looked around the room, as if trying to figure out whether this was some joke.

 

But this was no prank, nor was it a laughing matter. It was cruel coincidence, a disaster in the making and a tragedy beyond belief.

 

"My Lord?" the steward said, making quick notice of the shock playing across Elyas' face. Though Elyas doubted the steward could imagine he regarded these beasts with such utter terror.

 

Elyas' heart was pounding like mad, and each second that Azug stared at him only made it pound faster.

 

"Let's call it a day!" he exclaimed, shooting up from his chair with such speed that the steward nearly fell out of his own. The old man said something in response, but Elyas was already out the door and bolting down the hall at as fast a walk as he could manage. He needed to get that woman fired, or re-assigned to some plantation far away--he couldn't live in the same house as the Orc that had fucked him. It was only a matter of time until that beast let something slip and the entire manor knew what he'd done.

 

"Elyas?" came a booming voice behind him. He turned to see Azug standing at the far end of the wood-walled corridor, squinting at him as if still unsure of what she was seeing. It was too late now, but it occurred to him that he simply should have ignored her and played it off as a case of mistaken identity. She didn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed.

 

Swallowing hard, Elyas turned back the direction he had been heading and kept walking. Heavy footfalls sounded out, and he resisted the urge to break into a run as Azug shouted his name over and over, her tone carrying greater certainty that he was indeed who she thought. Heads were beginning to turn from the servant staff that Elyas passed, and soon he realized that he was not going to be able to shake this woman. Whirling about on his feet, he stormed towards Azug and grabbed her with both hands by one of her muscular forearms, then tried to leader her into a side room.

 

Key word being  _ 'tried'. _ Her arm went taut and he nearly slipped on the marble floor right then and there, and Azug responded with little but an annoyed grunt at his attempt to drag her.

 

"Please!" he pleaded with her, nodding at the closed door just beside them. She let out another grunt, then put one foot in front of the other and followed him inside. The space he led her into was small reading room, with a sunlit window running along the far wall that lit up a few high-backed chairs and small tables.

 

"What you doing here?" Azug asked as he closed the door and triple-checked the lock.

 

He turned back to her, wracking his mind for how best to explain his situation to her--and how much to tell her.

 

"I  _ live _ here," he said in a low voice, worried that his words might carry into the hall outside.

 

She gave him a doubtful sneer made all the meaner by the two little tusks jutting up from the corners of her mouth.

 

"You a whore," she stated.

 

"I'm not--" Elyas cut himself short, sighing and rubbing a hand over his face in shame and exasperation. "I didn't  _ work _ there. I just pretended to."

 

Azug made a thoughtful rumble, her fingers scratching idly at the side of her face. "Don't get it," she said finally.

 

"I was waiting for the madame, like you!" he hissed, gesturing frantically as he relayed that day's events. "Then you asked me 'how much', and I thought... why not?"

 

The Orc's creased brow relaxed, and she gave a toothy grin as she walked towards him. "You want Azug."

 

Elyas backed away from her, but it was only a few steps until he hit the door he had just closed, steadying the handle with one hand as he tried to hold back Azug's looming bulk with the other.

 

"No!" he whispered in defiant objection to her claim, turning his face away from her as she tried to lock lips with him. That heady scent he had tried so hard to forget was enveloping him again, and he knew he had to get out of here quickly to avoid falling under the strange spell this beast could somehow cast on him.

 

"Look," he muttered, grimacing as her tusks scraped against his cheeks and her hot breath caressed his face. "It was a mistake. I didn't know you had a--"

 

His words and thoughts ran cold at the feel of her bulge pressing up against his abdomen, Azug's hands pressed to the door frame on either side of him to keep him in place while she ground into him.

 

"You like it," she grunted. "I like it."

 

Elyas' arms relaxed despite the shame and righteous indignation roiling inside of him. Who was this Orc, to tell him what he liked, and to force herself on him. Inside of his own home, no less? Yet he couldn't push her away. Not because of her superior size and strength, but because his will to do so had nearly evaporated beneath her dominating presence.

 

"It's just... not how I pictured it," he murmured with his eyes half-closed. Azug grunted in response, her tone questioning - he wasn't sure what to think of the fact that he was beginning to understand her incoherent animal noises.

 

"Sex," he explained breathlessly. "My first time."

 

Azug's kissing came to an abrupt halt, and Elyas peeked open his eyes to see her staring down at him with a new sense of confusion.

 

"First time?" she echoed. He had told her at the brothel that it was his first time being  _ fucked, _ but only now had he let slip that it was first time doing anything more with a woman than some light touching. Knowing that he'd lost his anal virginity before he'd put his cock in a woman was humiliating enough, but saying it aloud was something else entirely. Azug simply stared at him, dumbfounded, and he was gripped by a sudden and urgent need to flee. His hand found the door knob behind him and twisted it, and Elyas nearly fell onto his back before escaping into the hallway. This time, the Orc did not follow.

 

The rest of the day was passed running family errands within the manor and at nearby locations within the city they sat on the edge of. Whenever he came home, he did his best to speed through the manor grounds that Azug and here cohort were busy patrolling. He was successful for a time, but gradually became aware that she was seeking him out. Eventually he came across her in an exterior hallway, and was certain she was going to corner him again. Instead, she walked right by him without meeting his gaze, and dropped a crumpled piece of paper to the ground just before passing him.

 

Elyas stooped down to pick it up, and found that she had left him a message.

 

_ 'Com cortyard toonit,' _ it read in child-like scrawl. Making out the letters was hard, and turning those malformed words into a meaningful sentence was harder still. From what he guessed, she wanted him to come to central courtyard out front of his home once night fell. For what reason, it didn't say. Was she going to blackmail him? Or maybe skip that step entirely, and simply force herself on him away from the watchful eyes of the servant staff?

 

Either possibility seemed equally likely, and both made a compelling case for  _ not _ humoring her attempt at a rendezvous. He was in no mood to skulk through a moonlit garden before being pulled into a hedge and fucked silly. Come late evening, he returned to his room and locked his door, then settled in for a sleepless night filled with thoughts of what awaited him outside. Strangely, he felt a bit bad about standing her up. He pictured Azug milling about the hedge maze, grunting in annoyance and spitting on the stone walkways. As he shifted in bed, a bit of pain flared up in his ass, which had still not quite recovered, and that put any feelings of guilt to rest.

 

He fell asleep soon after that, his eyes closing to the sight of the moon rising outside his veiled bedroom balcony.

 

Elyas dreamt that he was sailing on the open ocean, staring out at the moon reflected in the softly-rippling waves. Then, the waters became violent. The ship heaved from bow to stern, and frantic shouts came from down below. He was standing too close to the edge, and slipped from the side of the ship, falling into the waters below. The moonlight vanished, and there was only blackness. But no cold water. Instead, he felt rough fabric scratching at his face. And he could still hear the shouts, but they weren't panicked or fearful. The chorus of feet on stone and muffled chatter sounded nothing like the quiet of his home. If anything, it sounded like the city.

 

Elyas tried to sit up in bed, and quickly became aware of something digging into his stomach. Then, he realized that he was upside down. Convinced he had become tangled up in his bedding and fallen halfway to the floor, he thrashed and jerked until he fell to the ground. Which was, as he discovered when he smashed into it, quite a bit further than a few feet. Wincing against hard stone, he continued kicking at the fabric constraining him until he managed to pull free of it.

 

He had been right-this was not his bedroom. It was the middle of a city street, nearly empty in the dead of night. A few bemused passerbys commented on the man who had just emerged from a burlap sack, and in front of him stood Azug, an unreadable expression on her face.

 

"What the hell?" he gasped out, tearing his limbs free of the bag and scrambling to his feet. "Are you trying to kidnap me?" Elyas had half a mind to break into a blind sprint away from her, but he suspected her strength translated to speed as well. Better to stay out in the open, where there are witnesses.

 

"Not kidnap." Azug took a step forwards and pointed off at something behind him. "A present."

 

The street was familiar to him, and as he took a careful step away from her and glanced back, he realized why. They were out front of the same brothel he had visited a month ago, its golden signage and wooden pillars looking just as intimidating as they had the first time he laid eyes on it.

 

"What are we--" Elyas started out, cut short by Azug grabbing the back of his neck and squeezing tight.

 

"Come," she commanded, her painful hold forcing him to scurry alongside her as she strode towards the brothel. While he shouted in protest and uttered a silent wish that she would appreciate his relative fragility, they burst through the twin doors and entered the velvet lobby. Just past a short hall was a wide space filled with couches and lounge chairs, half of them occupied by lingerie-clad women of all shapes and sizes--though none quite as distinct as Azug. There was even a Dark Elf among them, her obsidian skin and silver hair bringing to mind Elyas' partner in his first wet dream. If only  _ she _ had been the one to drag him into a bedroom when he had first come here.

 

"I pay." Azug nodded ahead at the bevy of women spread out before him. "You fakka-fakka." She took a bag of coins from her belt and gave it a shake, and it occurred to Elyas that it was likely the same payment he had forgotten to claim after he'd staggered away from their first meeting. The room had reeked of rank sex, and he had left in a mindless daze punctuated only by jolts of pain from his cum-filled guts.

 

Before Azug could drag him the rest of the way, Elyas slid to a stop, ducking out from under her powerful hand and casting an anxious glance towards the prostitutes. They were all staring in his direction, clearly wondering just why a 7-foot tall Orc woman was dragging him into a brothel. Even here, they cut a strange pairing.

 

"Will you stop?" he hissed, darting out of Azug's reach as she tried to grab hold of him again. "I didn't  _ ask _ you to bring me here."

 

With that he spun about on his heels and stormed out, throwing the doors open again before they had even stopped swaying from Azug's forceful entry. Once out on the street he kept walking with long, fuming strides, feeling very upset for a reason he couldn't quite put his finger on. He was wide awake now, but in as much of a daze as ever, walking without having any real goal or destination. Azug was shouting out behind him, but he paid her little mind. Eventually he came to a small park at the center of the city, a forested area with shaded brooks surrounded by high stone walls. The place would have been pitch-black with the moon unable to pierce the dense tree cover, but a few lantern poles along the pathways created small areas of yellow light. He stopped at a backless bench just at the edge of one such lantern's glow and sat down, spreading his aching legs out and looking up at the leaf-veiled night sky above.

 

Azug stopped in front of him and put her hands on her hips, glowering at him with a ferocity that strangely enough, did not put any sort of fear in him. Either he was too worked up to care, or he had simply become accustomed to the Orc's fearsome appearance.

 

"You say you want to fuck." She leaned over, digging one meaty finger into his shoulder. "I take you to fuck."

 

He opened his mouth to object, then closed it and shook his head. That  _ had _ been what he'd said, though couched in more polite terms.

 

"I don't want to have to hire a prostitute," he sighed, leaning his elbows on his knees. "I want to have sex with someone who  _ wants _ to have sex with me. Having to pay for it is just... sad." 

 

For a time he just sat there, staring at the ground and listening to the rustle of leaves and the sound of fireflies. The city was asleep, and nearly silent now that they were in the seclusion of the park. He could easily forget that they were within the midst of civilization at all. After a few moments he heard the shuffle of feet scraping against dirt, and looked up to see that Azug was no longer there. She was walking down the pathway, already a dozen feet away from him and growing further still.

 

"Wait!" he shouted, shooting up and bolting after her. Their positions were now reversed, and he discovered that it was much harder for him to keep up with her than the reverse.

 

"I didn't mean  _ you're  _ sad," he explained desperately in between frantic breaths. "You're-"

 

A sharp snort from Azug cut him off. "Ugly. Too tall. Cock too big."

 

"You're not ugly!" he said, not even bothering to address the latter two points, which were right on the mark. "I said you were beautiful, remember?"

 

Elyas doubted most people would agree, but there was a sort of stonecut ferocity to her facenthat he found striking. She wasn't pretty, or cute, but she was eye-catching, in the same way a storm is.

 

Azug stopped and turned to him, her face nearly invisible in the dark of the poorly-lit park. Only her two white tusks caught enough light to let him know where she was looking.

 

"You hate me," she said darkly. "Hate my cock."

 

Elyas did his best to hold back a frustrated sigh as he wracked his brain for a response. Somehow, this Orc had turned even an intimate moment of pathos into something utterly vulgar.

 

"I don't  _ hate  _ your cock," he whispered sharply. "I liked it, alright? I... liked it." It was a thought he'd struggled with for weeks, and finally saying the words aloud seemed to put a new reality to them. For all the pain and shame it had brought him, he had  _ liked _ being made to suck this Orc's filthy cock and before taking it up the ass. He wasn't sure what that made him, but he wasn't normal. That much was certain.

 

Azug's teeth appeared in the darkness to form a broad grin, and in that moment he realized that he'd been tricked.

 

"You like it," she echoed as she took a step towards him. Her arm wrapped around his back before he could retreat and she pulled him off the trail with her. "Knew it," she muttered over and over like some fevered prayer. Her strength was irresistible, and only became more so when she stopped and put a second arm around him.

 

"Say it," she rumbled, her deep voice carrying through the tits pressed up against his face. "You wanna fakka-fakka."

 

Elyas melted in her grip, his breaths coming so hard and so fast that he heaved back and forth which each one. The night air was sticky on his skin, and Azug's intense body heat had him sweating through his clothes. That, combined with her spicy scent, had his brain mired in steamy thoughts of just what Azug was offering him.

 

Wasn't it just what he had been seeking? Someone to fuck, who  _ wanted  _ him to fuck her. She had a cock, sure, but he was far beyond such petty concerns after what they'd already done. Him fucking  _ her  _ would be positively normal in comparison.

 

"Azug," he murmured, drawing a grunt from the Orc who had caught him in a bear hug. "Can you... and I..." His throat ran dry and he swallowed, and Azug grunted impatiently.

 

"Can you suck my cock?" he finally blurted out, nearly shouting the words. A few startled birds left the trees above them in a chorus of chirps, but then all fell silent.

 

"I suck you?" Azug asked, her voice wavering with uncharacteristic nervousness. Her grip on him loosened, and Elyas got the distinct impression that this had not gone the way she'd expected it to.

 

"You don't want to?" he wondered just as uneasily. It took a few moments more for realization to dawn on him. She hadn't been offering to take the place of one of the brothel girls--she just wanted to fuck  _ him _ again.

 

Azug made a thoughtful rumble, her fingers working nervously where they had dug into his back. Elyas pulled away in embarrassment at this proposition gone wrong, and Azug let him slip from her arms. Then, to his great surprise and greater discomfort, she grabbed him around the back of the neck and lead him towards the bench he had just left.

 

"You sit." She sat him down on the bench, then went down into a deep squat between his spread legs, displaying a startling amount of flexibility for someone so bulky. Her hands went for the waistline of his trousers, then pulled back as her face creased into a frown.

 

"Legs hurt," she muttered to herself as she stood back up, then straddled the backless bench. The wooden slats creaked under her weight, making Elyas' stomach leap with certainty that he was about to be sent crashing into a pile of splinters. That particular worry vanished when Azug grabbed his right leg and left arm, spinning him towards her and swinging his legs across the bench much like hers.

 

"You stay," she snapped. "No move." Her hand pressed firmly to his chest, easing him into a lying-down position with his feet on the ground on either side of the bench, and his crotch presented towards the Orc like some obscene offering. It hadn't been that long since he'd been pinned underneath her with a foot of cock lodged up his ass, but somehow this made him feel more exposed. Clumsy hands fiddled with the drawstring of his pants, and he stared up at the lamp-lit branches swaying gently above as Azug struggled to get the fly undone. Eventually she managed to get his fly open and pull out his flaccid dick, though not before her impatience had lead him to worry she might tear his pants clean off. Calloused fingertips grasped his cock, rubbing back and forth with a gentle pressure that Elyas made a point of silently thanking her for. Were she to handle his manhood with the same roughness she did the rest of them, he would end this night a eunuch.

 

"That feels good," he said, receiving no response from Azug. Tilting his head up slightly, he saw that her gaze was fixed firmly on his dick, her brow furrowed in intense consideration. Only then did he consider what this would look like to some stray passerby--like a crime in progress, most likely. But he had yet to see another soul in this park, and anyone that came here this time of night was likely engaged in something equally unseemly.

 

"Can you lick it?" he said softly. Azug stopped stroking, at her eyes snapped up to meet his. It wasn't the smartest thing to ask of a sharp-toothed Orc with a jaw that looked primed for chewing gravel, but the clumsy mashing of her fingers into his groin had yet to bring him to hardness.

 

Azug made a noise that almost sounded like a groan of embarrassment, then looked back down at the focus of her efforts and leaned forward as she opened her mouth slightly and slipped her tongue out. It was long, and wide, and pink--in odd contrast to every other inch of her body. When the tip of it touched the base of his cock he hissed through his teeth, reveling in the feeling of what quickly became a full-shafted tongue bath. She wound her tongue around his cock, tilting her head now and then to better reach all sides of it as she worked from top to bottom. With two of Azug's fingers holding his cock upright at the base, he quickly grew hard under her efforts.

 

"That's  _ really _ good," he said, with far more enthusiasm than the strained compliment he had given her unskilled attempt at a handjob.

 

Growing bolder, Azug slipped his cock into her mouth, easily enveloping the entire shaft in the blink of an eye. Her plump lips pressed into his groin, and her tongue continued to wind around his cock as she sucked up and down. The blowjob was clumsy, rough, and Azug had to halt every few moments to gag or cough against what was an unfamiliar intrusion for her. But that awkwardness only made the experience all the more engrossing for Elyas. Here he was, receiving a blowjob from an Orc twice his size who acted as if she had never put lips to cock before. Yet he had tamed this beast, convincing her to suck him off in the open air of a public park. Despite the complete vulnerability of his awkward position underneath the Orc, a feeling of burgeoning dominance welled within him.

 

He placed his hands atop her head, resting them there as if to measure the depth of her movements. They became more skillful as she worked, her lips staying locked to his dick from head to base while her tongue seemed to wrap around the entire thing at once. Azug fondled his balls while she sucked, rolling them across her powerful fingers with a force that bordered on the painful. But even that mild discomfort was fuel for the all-consuming lust eating away at him. He wasn't sure who was controlling who anymore, and he didn't care. Azug may have had his sac in the palm of her hand, and his member caught between locked lips, but she had just as firm a grip on his brain. He would say anything, do anything, pay any price for this to go on forever.

 

But it was not to be. A familiar tingling sensation rose in his groin, spreading outward like lightning and heat that had his muscles clenching and cock twitching. Rapturous ecstasy washed over him as his balls pulled tight, and in his last cogent moments he found himself wishing that he  _ weren't _ cumming--he would prefer to remain in that warm mouth of hers forever.

 

Breathing so fast his rising chest nearly blocked his view, Elyas lifted his head up to look down his body and watch as Azug grunted and squeezed her eyes shut, cheeks bloating with the force of the load he was shooting into her mouth. She stopped sucking and moved her lips to just below the head, making each shot an excruciating one that he had to push out with clenched buttocks and bucking hips. Her throat moved in undulating waves, taking his seed into her stomach with as much speed and enthusiasm as he gave it to her.

 

When she finally pulled off his spent cock, she took a sharp breath in through clenched teeth, as if grimacing at the bitter taste. There was something amusing about this woman, of all people, acting so squeamish. Elyas hadn't reacted half that animatedly when she had spewed into him--though, to be fair, he had been less concerned with the taste and more worried about drowning. At the time, with gallons of Orc seed shooting straight down his throat, it hadn't seemed so ridiculous a fear.

 

Azug gripped his cock with two circled fingers and smacked it against her lips a few times, then sat up and gave another wipe to her saliva-slicked mouth. Elyas sat up facing her, both of them straddling the bench with their legs, though she had a far easier time of it. Just as the praise of love and lust was about to pour from his lips, he noticed Azug fiddling with the waistband of her pants. She rolled the loose garment down, hooking it under her bulging, leather-strapped package before unfastening her underwear and letting her long, uncut cock roll free. It was thick, green, and topped by a bush of coarse black pubic hair that glistened wetly in the dim light. Precum oozed out of the barely-exposed head, staining the bench wherever it dropped. Azug gave the length a few good pumps, then angled it towards Elyas and grabbed the back of his head.

 

"Suck." The order was simple, but her desire was abundantly clear--and made even clearer when she pulled him forward, forcing him to balance his hands on the sides of the bench while his pursed lips were smeared with musky orc meat.

 

"Azug!" he blurted out, forced to keep his objection brief for fear of giving her an opening in which to jam her cock through.

 

He tried to resist, to push away and tell her this wasn't the time nor the place, but that would have sounded absurd considering what she'd just done for him. His attempts were made more difficult by the fact that the more of his face she smeared with her slimy cock, the weaker his arms got and the more impotent his resistance became. With his lips closed tight, every breath was taking through his nose, giving him a head full of the odorous scent of raw Orc. It was disgusting--he knew that--but he couldn't draw away from it. Soon he was taking deep breaths in, with what little independent will he had dedicated to keeping his lips closed to her. There was nothing wrong with simply smelling her, after all--that was harmless enough.

 

Azug made an amused rumble, then moved her hand down her half-hard cock and slapped him lightly on the face with it a few times.

 

"You like. I see your eyes."

 

Elyas could only imagine the sort of stupefied, musk-addled expression he looked up at her with. Despite this Orc's crudity, roughness, foul demeanor, and general lack of hygiene, she somehow managed to keep bringing him under her thrall. Whether it was her bestial sexuality, her addictive scent, or simple animalistic dominance, he couldn't say--nor could he summon the strength of will to do anything but acquiesce to her demands.

 

"Open," she said. His mouth obeyed without his mind having any say in the matter, and her precum-oozing cock slid in with only a mild strain inflicted on his jaw. The angle of her cock was an awkward one, but it was still soft enough that Elyas was able to open up his throat and allow it to slip in. Through ragged breaths he felt it go deeper and deeper, until his tonsils were a distant memory and it seemed as if she would pop out of his esophagus and into his stomach. Bringing a trembling hand to his neck, he felt at the unseemly bulge her shaft had created, his eyes going wide at the palpable sensation of her length passing to impossible depths. Her crotch grew closer, until finally his nose was being tickled by wiry pubic hair that reeked of stale sex. Being within a few feet of Azug made her dislike of bathing abundantly clear, but having his face buried in her groin turned her spicy odor into a drug that smothered his thoughts and sent his cock twitching anew.

 

Azug lifted her buttocks off the bench with a creak of wood, and gave slight thrusts up into Elyas' mouth, but it was no good. She was growing harder by the second, and his throat was not so malleable that she could simply fuck it straight like she had his colon. Grunting and panting, Azug pulled Elyas forward, forcing his legs to leave the ground and nearly putting his chin on the bench. With his palms flat on the wood beside his head he stared up at the towering Orc, watching with shock, horror, and elation as she drew her cock halfway out, then slid it back into his upturned esophagus. She fucked into him like that again and again, making a pussy of his throat and turning him into a quivering mess of tearstained gurgling and choked gasps. Her balls swung into his throat, each sharp slap marking the point where she was at her deepest within him. His eyes rolled back into his head and eventually he simply closed them to avoid the bush of air mashing into his face.

 

Somehow, he stayed conscious through it all, bracing himself for the moment when Azug would slam hard into him and flood his belly with hot cream. His throat seemed to open up wider at the thought, his body preparing to receive something it new it needed. Then, she stopped, her cock still lodged in his throat, and tilted his head gently upward.

 

"I wanna fuck you," Azug said. It was phrased  _ almost _ like a request, but everything about her tone, the dire expression on her face, and the meat shoved down his throat told him that this was a demand.

 

"You say yes," she barked out.

 

All Elyas could do was nod as much as his painful position allowed him to. He did, after all, want her her inside him. In his throat, and up his rear. Some small part of his mind reminded him of how painful the aftermath of their last coupling had been, and how mortifying it had been to slink past the servants looking nine months pregnant--but those worries seemed impossibly far away. This unbearable pleasure and need, burning him from the inside out--that's what was real.

 

Yes, he thought, nodding again. He needed her cum shot down his throat, and even more than that. What, exactly, he couldn't quite put into words while she was skullfucking him senseless. He only knew that whatever she wanted to do to him, would happen. Any consideration of 'allowing' her to fuck him didn't even enter his mind.

 

"Rape!" came a cry through the fog of lust, pulling Elyas from the brink just as he felt ready to give himself over to Azug completely. The Orc dropped his head, then yanked her cock out of his throat. Elyas looked first right, then left, and his eyes fell upon a middle-aged woman some fifty feet down the park path, wearing a morning dress and carrying an umbrella. She was pointing at the two of them, mouth hung open in horror as she shouted the word again and again.

 

"Guards!" she cried, shuffling away as fast as her heels would allow. Azug stood up from the bench, swinging one leg over Elyas as he groggily pushed himself upward. With his senses returning and her bulk no longer blocking his view, he could see the first wisps of daylight piercing the tree cover covering the park.

 

"We need to leave," he choked out, his voice hoarse and throat aching from the abuse she had done to it. To his slight surprise, Azug was moving with an even greater sense of urgency than him. Her pants were fit loosely to allow her to conceal the obvious bulge she walked around with, but that also meant there was nothing to restrain the towering erection she was no burdened with. It tented one pant leg obscenely, creating a wet spot where his spit and her precum gathered.

 

Grunting in frustration, she tore her leather underwear off, then sat back down and hurriedly used it to tie her cock to one leg. That seemed to work, though it was clear from the few steps she took towards Elyas that it was going to make walking quite awkward for her.

 

"Come, come!" she hissed, grabbing him by the arm and hauling him to his feet. For nearly a minute she simply dragged him behind her in their flight from the park, and it was only when she stopped at the streetside gates to check for any city guards that he was able to shake her free and regain his footing. Seeing that they were clear, she started off at a fast stride that was hobbled somewhat by the third leg she had tied to her left.

 

"Can't get in trouble again," she muttered under her breath. "You see guard, you tell me."

 

Struggling to keep up, Elyas cast a wary glance up at her. "Again?" he asked uneasily. "Have you been accused of  _ rape _ before?"

 

Azug's eye twitched and she let out a hard snort. "Misunderstanding."

 

That revelation had Elyas putting a greater distance between the two of them, but he still had no choice but to follow. The cobble streets were largely empty, but homes of wood and stone were beginning to light up with morning lanterns as the city began to awake. He needed to reach home before one of the servants entered his bedroom and found him gone.

 

They walked for quite awhile, giving him ample time to recover the senses that had been stripped of him by Azug's musk. There was some sort of pheromone drug exuded by her skin, he was sure of it. How else to explain the spell she was able to put him under time and again? Azug walked ahead of him up the sloping road to his family's called manor, her head turning this way and that to look for any house guards who might see the two of them slip in. As he watched this beast of a woman, he found himself gripped with the certainty that he couldn't let himself come near her if he was to keep his ass intact. Even something so seemingly harmless as a kid would turn into her demanding more and him giving in to her crude demands.

 

The pair cut away from the main road and slipped in through one of the sides gates meant for servants, plodding carefully through the garden as they sought to enter the main home without drawing any curious eyes. Azug relaxed quite a bit once she was out of the city, free of her chief worry of being arrested for the public rape of a young man. Elyas, for his part, was just as concerned about being spotted as ever. Azug might not care about her reputation, but he didn't want to be known as the one who snuck around the grounds in early-morning with an Orc. What if some of the servants had caught wind of Azug's particular... endowment? He shuddered at the thought of that rumor reaching his family's ears.

 

They left the hedge maze, and only a few dozen feet lay between them and the double doors of the main building's entrance. For a few elated moments, Elyas was sure that they were home free--until a cry rang out across the courtyard.

 

"Oi!" shouted a guard from one of the towers lining the compound's walls. "There they are!" 

 

Seconds later, a swarm of people descended on the two of them. Servants, more pike-wielding guards, and most frightening of all, Elyas' parents. They seemed to come from every nook and crevice, until he and Azug were utterly surrounded. It was a nightmare that he could not wake from, not matter how hard he shouted in his mind for it to be so. Every eye was turned on him, and the cock-wielding Orc woman he had just snuck back home with in the early hours of the morning. If only one of the guards would take their sharpened pikes and run him through then and there--that would be far preferable to trying to explain this.

 

"I'm so glad you're alright!" his mother shouted, bursting through the crowd. She was wearing a nightgown, and grabbed him to try and deliver a kiss on his cheek before Elyas pulled back, remembering where his mouth had just been.

 

"W-why wouldn't I be?" he asked nervously, keeping a safe distance from her.

 

"Your door was broken down!" she exclaimed. "We were sure you'd been kidnapped!"

 

Elyas' jaw dropped open and he spared a quick glance at Azug, who was staring blankly off into space, deliberately ignoring his attempt at eye contact. He could picture the chain of events clearly. The Orc, frustrated with his attempts to keep her out, had chosen to bypass his locked door by battering it down completely. What excuse she would have offered up later, he had no idea.

 

"Kidnapped?" he asked, unsure of what else to say. He couldn't very well tell her the truth. As he echoed his mother's words, Azug's eyes shot wide open and she took a step towards him.

 

"Kidnapped!" the Orc boomed, startling the assembled people. Only the three other Orc guards seemed unshaken by her volume. Azug gripped the back of his neck hard, keeping her pinching fingers just out of view of his mother. "I see someone climbing down with bag." She pointed to a corner of the mansion, past which lay Elyas' balconied bedroom. "I chase to city, they drop bag."

 

His mother's face took on a look of renewed terror and she looked from Azug to him. "My God, is that true?"

 

Before he could speak, Azug's hand squeezed his neck so hard he thought she might pop a vertebrae right off his spine. Grimacing under her powerful hold, he drew his shoulders upward and nodded as he attempted to play off his pain as lingering fear from the 'kidnapping'.

 

"That's what happened," he said through halting gasps. "Just as she said."

 

The chaos that followed had Elyas seriously second-guessing his split-second decision to back her up. His mother exploded at the guards and servants, demanding that they comb the grounds for any evidence the intruder may have left, and telling the old Steward to get the captain of the city guard here so that he could have the city combed clean. Azug allowed herself a satisfied smile, and her grip on him eased into a neck massage that would have been comforting if it didn't remind him of just who he had let off the hook.

 

But what else could he have done? Told everyone that Azug had kidnapped him to take him to a whorehouse--one he'd been to once already--followed by him willingly pleasuring her in the openness of a public park? No, he'd taken the best of two awful courses of action. All he could do now was pray that the path he'd set himself on was not a rocky one.

 

Elyas was able to detach himself from Azug in the flurry of activity that seized the entire compound, but that did not last long. Fearing future kidnapping attempts, his family appointed her as his personal bodyguard, seeing as she was the one who had 'rescued' him. She was given a bedroom adjacent to his, with a door connecting the two rooms. Elyas had begged his parents to have a lock put on the door, but they had outright denied that request, saying that would defeat the whole purpose of keeping her so close. What if someone broke into his room through the balcony, they had said. He couldn't tell them  _ why _ he wanted the lock, of course, so in the end he was forced to let the matter drop.

 

He tried to keep a good distance from Azug, but that was made nearly impossible by the Orc's constant push to be at his side and his family's angry chastisement whenever he ditched her. Until his kidnapper was found, they said, he would be confined to the manor grounds. That would never come to pass, he knew, so he would have to wait until they simply tired themselves out and gave up searching. Hours turned into days, and his will slowly began to break down. It started as furtive glances cast towards Azug, admiring the shape of her bust and buttocks and remembering how striking her curves were when he had first laid eyes on her nudity. Then, his eyes started to travel downward. Her baggy pants did a decent job of hiding her endowment, but occasionally she would sit or lean in just the right way, and the loose fabric would catch an imprint that set his heart pounding.

 

She knew what she was doing to him--he was sure of that. For a week he spurned her advances, forcing him from his bedroom when she intruded and taking a step away whenever she tried to corner him against a wall mid-conversation. The games he played annoyed her to no end, and he had to admit feeling a bit bad whenever his ear caught an impatient grunt from her. But then he remembered the sort of pain and humiliation he was trying to avoid, and reminded himself that his attraction to her was purely a chemical one. He couldn't in good faith tell himself that he didn't like her cock--after a week of thinking about it, his mind was practically screaming out for it. He'd never felt this burning need before that night with her in the brothel. Perhaps if he avoided coming into contact with her 'womanhood', he would stop thinking about it--like an addict going cold-turkey.

 

But just as he couldn't truly avoid the woman, he couldn't stay away from the bundle of Orc meat she carried between her legs. 


	3. Playing Hard To Get

Elyas' family, anxious for his safety, had insisted he learn how to defend himself--and Azug, who was always at his side, had volunteered her service. She had been a mercenary once, she told them in stunted English. Elyas wasn't sure if that was true, or if it was simply a convenient excuse to force him into tight quarters. In either case, it worked. She brought him down the manor's basement, where an empty room covered with straw mats had often been used by his family's guards. But with the human guards gone and their places taken by shiftless Orcs, the room sat empty. The perfect place for Azug to train Elyas, and the perfect place to get him alone.

 

The walls and floor were thick stone, and the only exit was a long hall that turned a few times before connecting to the main cellar and the stairs back up. A few servants would come and go from there, but they wouldn't delve this deep into the basement. As he watched Azug standing by a bench, stripping off her shirt, he wasn't sure if he wanted them to. Her back muscles rippled under her leather bra. It seemed to Elyas that must chafe terribly, but she wore leather underwear as well--perhaps Orcs had a thicker hide, in the most literal sense of the term. She then kicked her boots off, but to his conflicting relief and disappointment the pants stayed on.

 

Azug seemed to notice where his eyes were darting as she approached the center of the mat, and she grinned. "Pants off?" she said, hooking her fingers in the waistband.

 

Elyas forced a frown and looked away. "No."

 

She let out a short laugh, then stopped her walk and waved a hand at him. "Shirt off. No fighting with shirt."

 

With great reluctance he stripped off his garment and laid it on the bench behind him, then walked over to her with uneasy steps. Without the benefit of clothing to obscure either of their figures, it hit him harder than ever just how much smaller and weaker he was compared to this woman. Every inch of her was bulging muscle, and even her fat was carried in such a way that it simply added to her imposing figure.

 

"Impressed?" she said, taking notice of his lingering gaze. Her vocabulary had improved quite a bit in the week she'd been glued to him, though her sentences remained short and clipped.

 

Elyas nodded idly. "Yeah." He could admit that much, at least.

 

Azug put her fists on her hips and thrust her abdomen out towards him. "Touch," she said.

 

He reached out, giving the expressionless Orc one last glance before pressing his fingertips to her stomach, then the flat of his palm, running his hand up and down her rippling abdominals. She was soft on top, but hard as rock underneath--the sensation called to mind a particular object he had been trying to force from his thoughts all week. Despite any worries that this harmless petting might soon get out of hand, he found his other hand joining the first. This one slid lower as the other went higher, and his palm brushed against the thick bush poking out of her waistline. He'd never expected himself to be so turned on by the mere sight of a tuft of pubic hair, but the quickening of his breath and heart had him pulling away in shock at his own reaction. Azug dropped her hands from her hips in disappointment, but her smile returned a few moments later when she remembered what they had come here to do.

 

"How you win fight?" she asked him.

 

Elyas thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Get a better weapon than your opponent."

 

She adopted a frown and waved a finger at him, clicking her tongue in mock chastizement. "You run."

 

The advice made a strange amount of sense, especially for someone as ill-suited to combat as him, but it felt strange hearing something resembling good ideas coming from her.

 

"You're going to teach me to run?"

 

Her frown vanished, replaced by a devilish grin that only widened as she approached him. "Gotta learn escape first."

 

Before he could back away from her ponderous advance, she lunged forward, grabbing him by the wrist and yanking him forward so that he stumbled face-first into her chest. She spun him around, putting him in a chokehold with one arm as the other wrapped around his chest, holding his flailing limbs tight. No matter how much he struggled, he couldn't shake free of her. Azug laughed and tightened her hold on his throat, making his ears ring as blood pooled in his head.

 

"You see?" she said. "No escape, no run."

 

His head was pressed in between her breasts, and a familiar bulge appeared as a soft pressure in the small of his back.

 

"What if someone grab you?" she murmured into his ear, her voice gentle in contrast to the painful hold she kept on him. "They do whatever they want. You can't do nothing." Her package ground up and down his back, and through the blur of sensations overtaking him he swore he could feel moistness seeping through the fabric of her pants--though that may have been the intense heat radiating from the larger woman. He slapped at her thigh a few times as he gasped for air, but in an absurd moment of conflicted motivation found himself hesitating so as to allow himself to feel her strength and womanhood just a little while longer. It wasn't just the feeling of her against him that had his passions flaring, but the knowledge that he wasn't the one in control. With her choking him and humping his backside, he could play unwilling party to her advances. He wasn't a pervert, after all--only the victim of a rapacious Orc with no sense of personal boundaries.

 

But even though it might have felt as if he needed cock more than he needed to breathe, survival instinct eventually won out. He slapped at her thighs with both hands, yet still Azug held him for a few moments--just to show who was in control. Then she let her elbow go slack, and Elyas drew in a massive breath of air through both mouth and nose--at the exact same moment she spun him around and forced his face in between her tits.

 

His lungs were burning hard enough that he couldn't resist taking in more frantic breaths, even if it meant getting a head full of Orc scent. She reeked of sweat and sex. It was a smell both titillating and nauseating, too overwhelming a sensation to allow him to put such firm words to the unreality of her odor. What it did to him, though, was very real. His muscles went slack and his eyes rolled back, and the fingers he dug into the roll of fat spilling over her pantline weakened noticeably. Again she'd given him the opportunity to enjoy her without having to admit his desires, and he couldn't resist allowing himself to give in.

 

"Why you not fight?" Azug said in dark amusement. She knew as well as he did why he couldn't, and he could sense a lilting humor underlying her words. Somehow he summoned the strength of body and mind to push away from her, though he strongly suspected that she simply allowed it. Her arms slipped free of their hold on his back, and he was left standing a few feet away from her, drawing in gasping lungfuls of air that still seemed tainted by the Orc's musk.

 

Azug clicked her tongue and shook her head. "No good. What you do if I not there and you kidnapped again?"

 

His eyes narrowed at her. "I wasn't  _ kidnapped," _ he said. "If anything, you're the one who..." He trailed off, seeing the toothy grin spreading across her face. She was messing with him. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't help but allow a slightly embarrassed smile to cross his own lips.

 

"You come at me." She waved her hands towards herself enthusiastically. "Put me on ground."

 

Elyas shook the fog from his mind, then started towards her with hands raised. The Orc may have been twice his size and more than match in strength, but he had some rudimentary skill in wrestling. Surely that advantage in technique would allow him to take her down? He might not be able to overpower her, but he could at least end this 'training session' not feeling as if he'd done nothing but be toyed with by a sadist.

 

He approached cautiously, then closed the remaining gap with a quick lunge at her midsection, wrapping his arms around her and shoving forward with all the force his legs could generate. To his elation, she tipped over--and him with her. For that split-second they spent in mutual collapse, it seemed as if he'd actually done something she wasn't expecting. But as soon as the Orc's back smashed into the ground, she grabbed his arms by the wrists and spread them wide, then wrapped her thighs around his neck in a chokehold that forced his face into her belly. His mouth was blocked by the roll of fat pressing into him, and his only means of breathing was through his nose, which was being tickled by the trail of hair connecting her belly button and groin. He wrapped his arms around her tree trunk-like thighs and tried to shake free, but her legs were even stronger than her arms. She grabbed his hands and pulled them up towards her, holding his grasping fingers to her chest as he clawed for release.

 

"Good smell?" Azug laughed, partly from amusement, partly from the air tickling her abdomen as Elyas took frantic breaths through his nostrils. "No bath for a week," she said in a low and sultry tone.

 

That much had been clear whenever he stood too close to her, but now that fact was shoved right in his face. The salty odor and feel of her flesh on his lips drove him to new levels of excitement, making him breathe even faster and putting his body in an endless loop of increasing arousal. To make matters worse--or perhaps better--her hardening bulge was pushing up against his throat, making its presence known with an exhilarating firmness and warmth that was palpable even with the layer of cloth and leather covering her womanhood. Saliva pooled in his mouth as he struggled, and each swallowing motion stroked the imprisoned monster grinding into him.

 

"You gonna fight?" Azug said, though Elyas was only dimly aware of the words. His palms rested motionless on her abdomen just below her breasts, and his eyes were closed as he took in deep whiffs of her sweaty stomach. There was no one here to see this, and he could enjoy her without shame or risk of ridicule. Azug would see, of course, but she already knew full well the sort of submissive reaction she produced in him. She had him wrapped around her finger, and he no longer cared.

 

Just as he felt himself start to drift off into blissful unconsciousness, Azug whipped his head to the side, rolling him over onto his back. She eased him out of her leg lock and sat upright, pinning his head to the ground with her muscular ass spread across his face. He slapped at her cheeks while shouting muffled protests, and she scooted back a few inches until his eyes and nose were free of the stifling confines of her buttocks. Her package rested square across his lips, too heavy and broad to talk or breathe through. His arms were no more available to him than his speech, pinned above his head with all of Azug's immense weight and bulging arms.

 

"You keep run from me," she said with a hint of annoyance. "You gonna run now?"

 

No matter how much Elyas kicked, he couldn't move the parts of him she had pinned to the mat--and even those weak efforts ended when he became aware of the erection tenting his pants. The reeking scent of week-old Orc, the enormous ass pushing the air from his lungs, and the wet groin pressed up against his softly-moving lips--it was all too much. The feel of his pants against his cock became an unbearable stimulation, and he had to keep perfectly still to keep from jizzing his pants right then and there.

 

Azug went quiet, staring down at him with a strangely intense expression as she shifted back and forth, her leather-clad tits swinging in and out of his vision as she moved. Elyas wanted nothing more than to cry out for her to fuck him, or for her to let him fuck her--or perhaps he would just gasp out 'fuck' over and over in simple need. But it wasn't just her immense balls blocking his attempts to speak--it was the pheromone-laden musk rendering him too weak and stupid to do anything but moan and take deep breaths in through his nose. It was often said that around a beautiful woman, men thought only with their cocks. Azug may not have been traditionally attractive, and she was only half a woman--but what she did to his brain was more real than any trite turn of phrase. When she was on him and in him like this, fucking his brain just as thoroughly as his holes, he needed her beyond words. And when he  _ wasn't _ under her spell, he was gripped by a perverse need to be put back under her control, and turned into a drooling, cock-hungry animal.

 

Yes, he thought to himself through the fog of lust. He didn't care anymore--he needed her.

 

Perhaps Azug saw that thought flash across his face, or perhaps she realized she better let him breathe through his mouth before he passed out. In either case, she moved, shuffling forward on her knees until her ass slid off of his face. Even though he was free of her oppressive bulk, Elyas couldn't yet move. He stared up at the ceiling, feeling as if he were spiralling down from some mountainous high. His physical arousal was a distant thought, until Azug crouched beside him and flicked the tip of his cock.

 

Elyas yelped and jolted upright, cupping his crotch protectively while Azug let out a booming laugh. Then, to his mixed surprise and disappointment, she turned and left, her laughter disappearing as she made the first of several turns back to the main cellar. His dick throbbed with mild pain, and with clenched teeth he carefully withdrew his hands to look at it. The front of his pants were soaking wet, and only then did he realize that he had cum from a single flick of her finger.

 

The rest of that day, Elyas could think of nothing but the Orc woman beside him. He had often had some reason or other to look forward to the next day, but he'd never anticipated nightfall itself with such urgent need. When he finally saw the sun dip below the horizon, he went to his bedroom as if that action alone would make the moon rise that much faster. He lay in bed atop his covers, waiting in rapt silence for any sign that Azug was making her way to the bedroom joined to his. To his disappointment and frustration, she had left for some other part of the manor after he'd retired early.

 

After what seemed an eternity of waiting, he heard it--heavy footfalls interrupted by long strides, making the floorboards out in the hall creak under some immense weight. He shot up from his bed and rushed for the door joining their bedrooms, but stopped cold when he was about to turn the handle. She hadn't even entered her room, and there he was about to barge right in. He felt like a drug addict, and likely looked like one too. He was breathing hard, and his hands shook with combined excitement and need. Her door hinges whined once as she entered her room, then again as the door swung closed. The familiar sound of wood buckling let him know that she had set down on her bed, and he forced himself to count to ten before making his move. Even that wait seemed too long, and he raced through the count before opening the door upon having reached 'eight'.

 

The bedroom was dark, with only a single high window letting in some errant moonlight. It wasn't a small space, but still had the feel of a cave--the musky smell of Orc certainly aided that impression. He turned his eyes to the bed on the right, where Azug lay with her feet pointed at him. Her hands were folded behind her head, and her clothes lay on the floor. A pair of breasts, huge even on her frame, sat in plain view, flanked by tufts of untrimmed black armpit hair. She shifted in bed slightly as he approached, and he found his eyes travelling down to her sheet-covered waist, where a long imprint marked the length and width of her flaccid cock.

 

"What?" she barked out, the blatant sense of annoyance in her voice startling him.

 

Elyas swallowed, taking a moment to find his words--he had never considered that he might need to use those here.

 

"I came to..." He trailed off, taking a step closer and letting his fingertips brush the edge of her bed as his eyes went up and down her body.

 

Azug snorted dismissively. "Don't feel like it."

 

Ever since she had left him in that sparring room, he had imagined the thousand different ways this night could play out. Yet amidst all the scenarios of tongue-fucking and deepthroating that ended with her driving her womanhood into him, he had failed to consider that she might simply refuse.

 

"What?" was all he could manage to stammer out, echoing the question she had so rudely greeted him with. Azug stared at him for a few moments, then lurched to the side and scooped up a pair of off-white cloth pants from the floor. She threw the unwashed garment at his face, and he drew it away to see her waving a hand at him.

 

"Go. Jerk off." She gestured at the door he had come through. "Azug wanna sleep."

 

With that final dismissal she heaved onto her side, the bed groaning with her weight as she turned her face away from him. Elyas turned and left, walking back to his bedroom with her pants in hand and a dumbfounded expression on his face. It wasn't until he was back in the moonlight of his bedroom windows and the door swung shut behind him that it truly hit him--nothing was going to happen. Not tonight, and maybe not ever. Had he waited too long? Had his deliberate avoidance of Azug frustrated her to such a degree that she was going to spurn any advances he made? Now, he was the one who was ready--but she was having no part of it.

 

Frustrated beyond belief, Elyas dropped her pants beside his bed and stripped off his own clothes before sliding into the covers. He was a little angry, very horny, and near grief-stricken with the opportunity he'd let slip by. He could no longer even remember why he had been so determined not to give in to the Orc's domineering lust. It seemed so stupid and petty now, worrying about what others might think if his bizarre proclivities were discovered. All the imagined shame in the world paled in comparison to the crushing need he felt for her.

 

Elyas lay there, the moon moving from the railing of his balcony to the cusp of the ceiling on its slow passage through the sky--and still, he could not sleep. Part of him wanted to creep back to Azug's room and beg her to do what she wanted with him. He would have done so, too, if he thought it would work. But the quick dismissal she had given him left no room for maybes or some days. Heaving a tired sigh, he looked around the room for something to stare at besides the wood-carved ceiling, and his eyes fell on the pants Azug had tossed at him.

 

'Jerk off', she had said to him. At the time, it had seemed like adding insult to injury. But now, he wasn't so sure. If he followed her humiliating order, would something more come of it? It seemed absurd, and he failed to see how it could--but lying sleeplessly for another hour was far worse a prospect. He slid out of bed and scooped up her pants, then got back into bed and held the bundled cloth to his face as he drew in a deep breath. The smell was nowhere near as strong as when it had come from the Orc herself, but it was Azug nonetheless--an unmistakable mix of masculine and feminine that put his cock at full mast in the blink of an eye.

 

With one hand keeping the garment pressed to his nose, he fished his dick out from his underwear and began stroking. It had been less than half a day since Azug's 'training' had made him shoot his load in his own pants, but already he felt his balls ready to burst again. Each lung full of Orc scent took away the outside world and put him in a better, imagined one, where Azug's crotch was pressed to his face and her rough hand rubbed at his cock. The smell of her was not as strong as he would have liked, and the image became hard to hold onto--but he did not need it for long. His body jerked and spasmed, shooting ropes of cum all over his belly and chest. It was hard to believe his balls had held so much, and when he finally came down from his high and took a look at how thoroughly he had painted himself, he was left with the very messy question of how to clean up.

 

The nearest towels were in the bathroom, and he feared leaving a trail of sticky seed that ran clear across the fine wood floors. So, he used Azug's pants. She might not be happy about it, he reasoned, but she was the one who had told him to jerk off. This would be his small revenge for her instilling this hopeless addiction in him.

 

Sleep eventually came to Elyas, but when reality returned so did all of the desire and dissatisfaction that had gripped him so thoroughly the night before. Azug walked at his side around the manor as always, but the looks she gave him were cold and disinterested. Eventually he became bold--and desperate--enough to lay hands on her, a brief touch to the shoulder or arm. She never recoiled, but she might as well have been a statue for all the response she gave him. Come lunch time, she disappeared entirely, leaving Elyas to sit alone in the palace courtyard among the hedges and the occasional passing servant.

 

Just as he was nearing the end of his meal, he heard the trademark thump of her boots against stone behind him, and turned to see her striding towards him at a fast pace. In her left hand was a bundle of beige fabric, and he nearly choked on his food when he recognized the pair of Azug's pants he had cleaned himself off with. He had stuffed them under his bed the night before, intending to clean them in private the next day--but in his sad state, the task had completely slipped his mind.

 

Azug stopped beside him, holding the pants to her nose and giving them a light sniff. "I smell you," she said. Part of him was tempted to play ignorant, but the Orc didn't need some supernatural sense of smell to figure out what had happened. She had thrown the garment at him, and now less than a day later, they reeked of semen. There was no lying his way out of this one.

 

"Why you do this?" she asked.

 

Elyas put his utensils down and swallowed the last of his food, careful not to choke on it as every muscle in his body trembled in abject fear.

 

"You said to..." He trailed off, wanting to tell her that she had told him to jerk off--but she hadn't told him to soil her garment. Her eyes narrowed and she leaned over, holding the evidence of his perverse deed beside her stony green face.

 

"You gonna apologize tonight," she said in a deep, rumbling voice.

 

"Tonight?" he asked, his unease tempered with a foreboding curiosity that had his heart pounding so hard his ears rang.

 

"You come to my room." She stared at him for a few moments as if in thought. "You crawl. Hands and knees." With that final demand she dropped the pants into his lap, and left. Elyas hurriedly stuffed the sullied garment into his pocket as best he could before someone could see what had transpired, then made for the manor to get her pants clean and out of his hands.

 

Come nightfall, he was beset by a growing apprehension like none other. His mind was filled with thoughts of what awaited him in Azug's bedroom, but he did his best to temper any expectations with the knowledge of how his last advance on her had gone. There was always the possibility that she was simply angry about her clothes and in a mood to humiliate him, with no sex on the menu whatsoever. Though, strangely enough, even the thought of her berating him while he knelt in front of her had his heart pounding with excitement. He really was developing some odd tastes.

 

When he finally heard Azug enter her room, he immediately leapt up from his bed and made for her door before stopping and considering his dilemma. If he entered too quickly, she might find his eagerness distasteful. If he waited too long, she could see that as further spurning of her advances--if this was, indeed, some odd kind of sexual invitation. He didn't know what it was, and he didn't know what to do. In the end he crept back to his bed, sat down, and counted down to two minutes before once again rising. He got down on hands and knees, crawling across the hard wood to her door in nothing but his underwear with Azug's cleaned pants clenched in one hand. Even with no one to see, it was a humiliating act. He reached up for the door knob and turned it, throwing it open slightly before pushing it open with his head and moving inside.

 

Azug sat on the foot of her bed, feet planted on the floor and arms propped up behind her. She was wearing only her leather-lined underwear, the rest of her dimly illuminated by the sliver of moon visible through the window above her. Every bulging muscle and ripple of fat was cast in stark relief, and her green eyes seemed to glow with an especially intense ferocity. She grunted at him and beckoned forward with one finger. Elyas began to stand, but quickly remembered her orders and continued his slow crawl until he was at her feet.

 

"Sorry," he murmured, reaching up to hand her the pants in his hand. Azug eyed them for a moment, then took the garment and tossed it across the room, as if it were an afterthought. Her gaze then snapped back downward, and she eyed Elyas with an exaggerated show of disdain.

 

"You like my smell?" she asked.

 

He swallowed hard and nodded, forcing himself to maintain eye contact with the much larger woman. "I like it," he said softly.

 

A white-toothed grin flickered in the moonlight for the briefest of moments, and she scooted back on the bed. "You gonna give me a bath."

 

Elyas eyed her cautiously. "A bath?" Azug made use--very  _ rare _ use--of the public one on the manor grounds frequented by the other servants. There was one connected to Elyas' bedroom, but he struggled to imagine her fitting in the tub.

 

Azug slapped the bed beside her. "Come."

 

Elyas couldn't move fast enough. He scrambled to the foot of the bed, then crawled up beside her. She grabbed the back of his neck with one hand, and with the other gave her stomach a hard slap.

 

"You lick." Her voice was firm, unwavering and as hard as the hand hooked around his neck. "Lick good."

 

Despite the funky smell of week-old Orc--or perhaps, because of it--Elyas needed no further encouragement. He dove onto her stomach faster than her hand could move him to it, running his tongue over her bulging abdominals without even the pretense of reluctance. He couldn't possibly clean the massive woman's entire body, but he went at the task with unbridled enthusiasm anyway, moving from the center of her stomach to the tuft of pubic hair over her crotch. It was coarse, and rough on his tongue, but the pungent smell down there drove him wild. He would have undone the straps of her underwear with his teeth, if Azug had not grabbed him by the hair and hauled him off of her.

 

"What you doing?" she said. The steady tone of her voice told him that not only did she know, but had expected this.

 

"Can I?" said Elyas between breaths, his right hand grasping her bulge. Even through the thick underwear he could feel the separation between her heavy balls and thick cock.

 

Azug smiled, and unwound her fingers from his hair. "We see. You keep licking."

 

That vague hint of a promise was all he needed. With fresh vigor he dove onto her, panting and gasping as he licked across her flesh so fast and hard that he forgot to breathe. He moved up to her breasts, leaning over her lap to run his tongue beneath the flesh mounds. Azug saw him struggling to reach the far parts of her and grabbed him by the waist, setting him down on his lap and allowing him to truly embrace her. He held her by her sides, hands pressing into fat and muscle as he licked from her breast to her left armpit.

 

She lifted her arm up, clenching her fist and flexing her bicep. Elyas pulled back from her hairy armpit, taking a moment to marvel at the sheer size of her. He ran both hands up and down her arm, feeling the hard texture and smooth curves of her musculature. Azug grinned and allowed him that moment of contemplation, but eventually became bored and shoved his head under her arm. He kissed and sucked with reckless abandon, ignoring the hair filling his mouth as he sought the sweaty flesh underneath. Then he moved to her right armpit, taking a deep breath of her body odor that flooded his skull like a drug and made lapping up her sweat the most right-feeling thing in the world.

 

Azug pulled his head away, letting her arm drop and staring at him as if deciding what to do next. Wherever this went, he told himself, he would follow. She shifted back on the bed until she was lying in the middle of it, and Elyas nearly crawled on top of her before she violently flung herself onto her stomach, then got on hands and knees with her ass pointed at him. The underwear, he saw now, did not cover more than her crotch--both muscular green cheeks were left totally exposed. For one brief, ecstatic moment, he was sure that she was going to ask him to fuck her. Then, she reached back and spread those huge mounds, and he realized what she wanted.

 

A small voice protested deep in Elyas' mind, but he was too drugged with lust and Orc musk to do anything but crawl towards her on the bed until his face was buried between her cheeks. A few stray hairs tickled his face, and he slipped his tongue deep into her crack in an attempt to find the hole he couldn't hope to see in the dim light. He ran wet circles all around, eventually locating a small ring of rippling flesh. Azug grunted in satisfaction and reached back, shoving his face further in. He tried to slip his tongue inside her hole to probe deeper, but she was unbelievably tight. Only when she let out a deep moan and relaxed her tense muscles did her hole loosen enough to grant him entry.

 

By all rights, the smell should have been horrid--but Azug had done this same thing for him, and had gone just as wild as he was in that moment. This must have been a sign of how right they were for each other--that he could eat her ass without a flicker of distaste making him pause or pull back. He could stay in there all night, he thought to himself. Licking in alternating circles and jabs, caressing her hole as it winked open and closed for him. He could not push nearly as deep as Azug could with her long tongue, but he certainly tried. Azug shuddered and groaned, eventually releasing his head so that she could lay her own on the bed while Elyas ate her out. He choked and gagged a few times, but not from disgust. It was simply that he forgot to breathe, his body forcing him to draw life-sustaining breaths through her crevice even as his mind remained totally focused on the perverse task at hand.

 

After a time--he could not even begin to estimate how long--Azug sat up on her folded legs, forcing a disappointed Elyas to draw away from her ass as it pressed down to her feet. He shuffled forward and  shoved his hands between her arms and torso, running them up her belly and chest as he planted long kisses all over her back. His rock-hard cock ground up against her lower back, the underwear he wore long since stained with the precum that had flowed steadily ever since he first put his tongue to Orc flesh. Azug didn't object to his fevered groping, and in fact reached back with both hands to squeeze his buttocks. Her grip was far from gentle, but the strength she used told him that she wanted him--and that made him grow bolder. He moved both hands up to her breasts, seeking out her nipples before pinching them between extended fingers. They were hard despite the warmth of the room, and he slid his fingers in alternating motions, massaging them as he sought release against her back. Azug moved in time with his grinding, panting so hard he could hear it through the ear he had pressed to her sweaty back.

 

But then, she pushed him away. Not for lack of desire, he was sure, but because she didn't want him to finish just yet--and neither did Elyas. Still on her knees, she shifted around so that she was facing him, and hooked two sets of fingers into either side of her underwear. Elyas' heart skipped a beat and his breathing stopped altogether as he watched her undo first one side, then the other. The garment fell to the bed, exposing her tightly-packed set of balls, and the cock tucked between them that pointed back towards her ass. Her length slowly unravelled, swinging free of the sweat-and-precum stickiness that had kept it bundled together. Although fully flaccid, the head of her dick dangled low enough to brush the bedding between her knees.

 

Even from that distance, Elyas could smell her--pungent sex, soiling the air and tickling his nostrils just as thoroughly as it did his aching cock. He crawled forward on the bed, mouth watering and tongue lolling out like some sex-starved idiot. Azug held him back by the forehead before he could get anywhere near her cock, but even being within sniffing distance of her dripping womanhood made him feel as if his brain were being fucked before his body.

 

"Back," she said, giving him a light shove. Elyas reluctantly obeyed, giving her space to lay down on the bed. As soon as she was flat he crawled between her legs, closing his eyes and pressing his open mouth to the base of her shaft. His mind went wild, his senses overloaded by the rank smell of Orc cock, the salty taste of dried precum, and the delightfully spongy feel of her cock against his nuzzling lips. His world became narrower, until the only thing that existed was the leaking, foreskin-covered glans he placed between his lips. One of his hands found her hairy balls, adding those to the hazy scene. He rolled the hairy orbs across his fingers, imagining how much steamy cum must be contained within them. They were even fuller and hotter than he remembered from their first encounter--had she not blown her load since he had sucked her off in that park? The thought of Azug saving her seed until he finally gave into her made him want this all the more. Like him, she had been waiting--except she had never denied her desire.

 

Elyas continued to suckle on her length, allowing it to slip a bit deeper as blood flowed into her length and the trickle of precum from her slit intensified to a steady flow. His throat seemed to open up for her of its own accord, soothed by the liquid warmth that soaked his insides so thoroughly. With both hands gripping her length and his elbows on the bed for support, he drew back her foreskin, exposing the enormous head beneath. The smell hit him like a charging bull, turning his mind to mush and his hands to jelly. With trembling hands and wavering lips he circled his tongue under her glans, probing every odorous crevice of her enormous length. His fingers were stuck to her shaft by the sticky sweat and precum she had let dry there, a sensation that should have made Elyas' stomach roil in disgust--yet he felt nothing but lust towards this filthy beast of a woman. She was unclean, but so was what they were doing--and so was he. His mind was filled with thoughts of being defiled and broken by her, a proud young man brought low by something more animal than human.

 

As Azug's cock grew harder, Elyas began pumping her length, mashing her meaty foreskin into his lips as he slowly but surely inched his stretched mouth over the throbbing head of her dick. The precum coming from her slit--once a trickle, then a flow--was now a gushing outpour that came as fast as he could swallow it. The sheer volume of what she pumped into him would have been shocking, were he not too busy reveling in the unthinking bliss brought on by the bitter-sweet taste. His pumps slowed, and Azug responded by grabbing the sides of his head and fucking herself into his mouth with short thrusts that produced a gag with each bash of her glans against his tonsils. Spit shot out of the corners of his mouth and his eyes rolled back for lack of air, but he made no attempt to resist, only responding by propping himself up on her thighs and angling his throat so as to allow her better access. It had been an awkward position for a blowjob back on that park bench, and it was even more awkward here. The sheer size of her cock simply didn't allow for something like this--not with his esophagus remaining intact, anyway.

 

With an annoyed grunt Azug drew up her foot, then gently pushed back on Elyas' shoulder until he had slid free of her rigid length. He coughed and sputtered for a moment, but no sooner had he recovered than he was making another grab for her cock. She pulled it away and slapped at his hand, giving him a stern, disapproving glare in response.

 

"You want this?" she asked, gripping her cock at the base and waving it back and forth obscenely. 

 

Elyas nodded quickly, taking a moment to swallow before he started drooling like a starving dog. "I want you," he murmured. Not from fear of being heard, but for fear that speaking any louder would somehow rouse him from this dreamworld. Azug gave another grunt, half amusement and half satisfaction. Then she rose from the bed, circling Elyas like a predator eyeing its prey, all with her cock wagging in front of her threateningly. She stopped at the foot of the bed as he turned on his knees to face her, then climbed up towards him. With two quick, clean motions, she shoved him onto his back and yanked his underwear off. In another two seconds she was kneeling on top of his right thigh with his other leg held in the air. It looked as if she was preparing to snap him in two, and the strain in his groin made it feel that way, too. 

 

With his legs spread far apart, Azug took her cock in hand and began brushing it back and forth between his cheeks, smearing his entrance with precum. Elyas was certain that she was lubing him up in preparation to finger him, working her way up from one digit to three or four before attempting something so bold as fucking him with her cock--but then, she started driving forward. Lightly and shallowly at first, just to get her cock lodged between his cheeks. Then a bit harder, ramming forward with such force that his anus spasmed and loosened from the sheer shock of her thrusts. 

 

It seemed absurd to think that she could get inside him with no preparation, but the quickening of her thrusts and the increased passion behind her grunts had him realizing it was going to happen, one way or the other. He reached a hand up to try and push gently back on her, but he might as well have been trying to stop the ocean tide for all the good it did. His ass was on fire, and even through the fog of lust he could feel every nerve ending in his rear screaming at him to stop her--but it was too late. Azug was more animal than woman, panting so fast and so low that her breathing became a continuous roar of hot breath and flaring nostrils. Her cock sank into his rectum fractions of an inch at a time, his only-recently-recovered anus sending out waves of pain that left him unable to relax enough to even speak. 

 

It seemed to go on forever, Elyas clutching at the bedding and clenching his chattering teeth together as this Orc sought to hilt herself inside him. Halfway in, she hit that wall inside of him she had encountered last time--and just like last time, she barreled right through it, fucking his insides straight with no mercy. Elyas cried out in pain and shock, but Azug's hand let go of her cock and pressed the side of his face to the bed, cutting him short.

 

"You like it?" she panted, the words coming out as a barely-coherent slur. "You like me?"

 

Elyas choked out something resembling an acknowledgement, but couldn't summon the control to voice any more words than that, so he simply nodded. Azug huffed in satisfaction and snaked two large fingers past his lips, fucking his mouth as she drove ever deeper into the depths of his bowels. The deluge of precum she spilled eased her passage, but even that massive amount of lubrication merely turned an impossible insertion into a torturous one. There was no feeling to be had in his poor digestive system--and thank God for that--but he could mark the passage of her length by the feel of her cock head rubbing up against his abdomen. It was tempting to hold a hand to his stomach and see if he could feel for it, but the last thing he needed was another reminder of how badly she was ruining him.

 

Or rather, how badly he had  _ let _ her ruin him. Elyas had wanted this--and indeed, part of him still wanted it--but it was hard to keep that in mind through the gut-wrenching pain making his toes clench and legs kick in Azug's firm grip. This wasn't love-making, as he had deluded himself into calling it. There was no equal meeting of partners who explored each others bodies in patient curiosity. This was an Orc, his superior in size and ferocity, fucking him up the ass so hard that he might never walk again. It seemed odd for something so intimate to have winners and losers, but in that moment he certainly felt like the latter. This creature had seduced him, using her obscene size and addictive aura to lure him into this. This was a mistake, he knew. But worst of all, worse than having made that mistake in the first place, was the fact that he  _ still _ didn't regret it.

 

She stopped pushing into him without end, instead switching to a pattern of long drives forward and short withdrawals that fed him another inch of meat for every half inch she took out. Every withdrawal threatened to take his asshole with it, and he felt as if his rectum might simply collapse under the force with which she hammered away at it. He bit down hard on her fingers, more from simple need than any desire to force her off of him, but Azug didn't even seem to noticed. She pinched at and played with his tongue as she battered away at his rear, not slowing down until her heavy balls were brushing the top of his inner thigh. With one final thrust, heralded by a monstrous roar and a clenched hand around his face, Azug hilted herself in him.

 

Azug's balls mashed up against his buttocks, and Elyas felt himself being thrown about like a ragdoll, his left leg pushed closer to the bed and his right leg brought upwards so that he was lying on the flat of his back. Azug propped his ankles up on her shoulders and leaned over him, pressing his legs far past the point of their normal flexibility. By the time her forehead touched his, his toes were brushing the pillows piled up behind him, and his hamstrings felt ready to snap.

 

"You want fakka-fakka?" Azug asked, slowly losing her grasp on the English language as lust overtook her. Elyas nodded, unable to take his gaze off those glowing green eyes boring a hole in his skull. Azug snaked a hand between their joined bodies and grabbed his throat, holding it tight as she planted a wet kiss on his lips that only grew wetter as her slobbering tongue invaded his mouth. She drew her hips back and started fucking him in earnest, grinding her hips against his buttocks with her legs and one clenched fist as support. The weight on him was immense, and every part of him felt ready to break from the rough treatment. His insides, once somewhat adjusted to accommodating Azug's immense length, had been twisted up into knots by the new position. Now she was driving into them all over again, pushing aside vital organs in her use of him as a human-sized cock sleeve. The hand on his throat grew tighter as her breathing grew more wild, and he tried to choke out a plea for air--but he had waited too long. Her grip was already too firm, cutting off all but the thinnest sliver of air that allowed him to barely maintain consciousness as she fucked away at his bruised rear.

 

It was hard to say what was happening to his own cock throughout all of this. Any concept of his own pleasure had long since been tossed out the window, subsumed by Azug's complete and total domination of his body and mind. There may have been a slight tingle in his groin produced by the pressure on his prostate, but that was rendered nearly unnoticeable by the fire burning in his ruptured rear. He should have been slapping and scratching at the Orc, telling her to slow down, but he wasn't. One of his hands rested gently on the taut forearm choking him, while the other was draped around her neck, both struggling to maintain their grip as she fucked him into the bed. His body wanted this, he reasoned to himself. His mind--well, he wasn't sure what it wanted anymore. Elyas felt adrift, lost in a tumultuous fog of sights and sounds and feelings that pulled at him from a hundred different directions.

 

His eyes fluttering half-closed and vision growing dark, Elyas drew in a massive breath of air. It took him a moment to realize that the pressure on his neck had abated somewhat, and that he was now able to breath. His vision cleared and he saw Azug staring down at him above swinging breasts, spit dripping onto his face from between clenched teeth as she drove all of her animal lust into him.

 

"You mine," she said between breaths. Her head dipped lower, forehead pressing to his again as her fingers worked their way up from his neck to his ear. "Say it."

 

"I'm yours," he murmured. The words had been a lie, meant to calm her before she broke him in two, but they felt so right to hear himself say. He wrapped his hands around her neck, holding her close as she continued fucking him with violent rolls of her hips. "I'm yours," he muttered over and over, his words barely audible over Azug's roaring breaths.

 

Her thrusts became so fast and so deep that he thought she might drive him straight through the bedframe and into the floor. She pressed her lips to his, locking their mouths together in a tight kiss as her cock throbbed and balls pulled tight against his ass. The flood gates were thrown open, and warm cum flooded into him in a series of powerful pulses that he could feel traveling up the underside her shaft. The head of her cock bucked in his abdomen like some living thing, spewing ropes of cum too deep to fathom. She broke their kiss and stared into his eyes with an berserk expression like that of a woman possessed, then wrapped her arms around his head and pulled him tight into her bosom. She kept fucking her load into him while she smothered him in between her breasts, her warmth filling his insides just as thoroughly as it seeped into him from her sweaty flesh. Feverish grunts of love and lust reached his ears through her tits, but they were utterly incomprehensible. She had switched from English to Orcish, the only language with the words to describe what she was doing to him. In the past, he would have called her speech ugly--but he felt as if he could almost understand the language with her essence filling him up so thoroughly.

 

Azug slid her hands down to his hips, pressing him to her crotch in the vain hope of inserting her throbbing cock deeper into his swollen abdomen. Every passing second and each buck of her hips meant a new rope of thick cum being shot deep inside him, turning a once-flat stomach into that of a woman near childbirth. The pain in his rear vanished, and even the frightening bloating from her jizz became a pressure as comforting and secure as the hold Azug held him in. It was all worth it--the begging, the armpit-licking, the ass-eating, and the tear-stained gutfucking--all too receive this liquid drug, delivered to his very core in the most intimate way possible. It was a transcendent experience, the closest he had felt to a higher power. He had given himself over to this woman body and soul, and he had been rewarded for his trust.

 

They stayed like that for minutes, Elyas clinging to her long after she set him down on the bed. Eventually she pried his hands off from around her neck, then eased his sore legs down so that they were spread out over her hips, instead of propped up on her shoulders. She hunched over, brushing aside his matted hair and delivering kiss after kiss to every inch of his tear-stained face. He was hot, sore, bruised, aching, and completely unable to feel the hole she still had stretched around her softening length--but he felt nothing but a deep and abiding satisfaction. Azug gripped his half-hard cock and gave it a few tugs, but realized as quickly as he did that he had already cum. When or how, he had no idea. At some point during the frenzied fucking, she had milked an orgasm from his prostate without him even realizing it.

 

She returned her attention to his face, grasping it in both hands and brushing his cheeks gently with her thumbs as she pressed their foreheads together. He put his hands over hers, marvelling at the difference in size.

 

"Five minutes," Azug said. "Then we fakka-fakka again."

 

Elyas' blissful expression turned horrified. The heavy pair of balls still pressed against his ass told him that she had plenty of seed left to give, and the taut muscles rippling across her body said in no unclear terms that she had the strength to deliver it. But even if his mind was willing, his body could take no more. He would break--that he was sure of. Elyas started to object, but a toothy grin crossed Azug's face that cut him short. Orcs were not known for jokes, but that only made the rare ones all the more believable. She rocked back on her knees, careful to keep her cock inside him, then re-inserted herself and laid down next to him, pulling him close so that her tits were pressed to his back and her legs were wrapped around his. He had never fallen asleep with a monstrous dick plugging him full of gallons of cum before, but then again, he had never been that tired before. It took him less than a minute to drift off.

 

As for what to do if someone discovered them like that... Well, he would figure that out in the morning.

  
  



	4. Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Elyas tapped his boot on the pavement impatiently, looking up and down the cobblestone road that ran beneath his family's hilltop manor. He'd been standing out there for the better part of the morning and afternoon, enduring a summer heat that had long since become unbearable. He glanced over at the woman standing beside him, a towering Orc by the name of Azug--his personal bodyguard, love , and wielder of a cock that had to be seen to be believed. It was a strange coupling he found himself in, but he'd long since stopped being bothered by it. Not that he had told his family about the 'woman' he'd fallen into something of a steady relationship with. The mere idea of telling them made him simultaneously shudder and laugh. No, they could never know. No one could.   
  
So, he had kept her dalliances with Azug a secret. They had been nearly caught more than a few times, usually as a result of his lover's climax-accompanying roar that shook the rafters of her bedroom.   
  
_ 'Lover.' _   
  
God, it felt strange to call her that. It felt strange to call anyone that. A few months ago, he had been desperate to lose his chastity to a woman--any woman. He had gotten his wish fulfilled in a fittingly Faustian fashion. Azug, having mistaken him for a brothel worker, had fucked him. Then, she came to work for his family--and fucked him again. She was always open to sucking him off or finishing him off with a handjob, but had steadfastly refused his attempts to fuck her. It was the one thing that ate at him these days. That, and his family's whispers of marriage. Part of him wanted to reveal his tryst just to shock them into silence, but that would likely backfire. They would fire Azug, and marry him off to the first 'real' woman they could find in an attempt to cure him of this degeneracy.   
  
Sweat trickled down Elyas' brow, and he saw that he was no longer in Azug's cooling shadow. He took a step back, letting out a satisfied sigh as the warmth abated somewhat. She grunted in annoyance, shifting away so that the sun was back on him.   
  
"What?" he snapped. "It doesn't hurt you."   
  
Another grunt, and no explanation. Both of them darted around for a few moments, until finally he gave up and returned to scanning the road.   
  
"If you don't want to wait here, you don't have to," he said to her.   
  
A low rumble came from the Orc, one he had learned to associate with the slow workings of her alien thought process.   
  
"Why you meeting this boy here?" she asked. "He will come up."   
  
"Because I want to show confidence," he explained. "I refuse to hide behind my parents while they're fawning over Samuel. I'll greet him with a smile, then avoid him for the rest of his visit."   
  
Azug gave him a mean grin of her own. "You jealous."   
  
She wasn't wrong, but not for the reason she thought. Samuel had lived with Elyas for two long years, and in that time had managed to steal away every first love Elyas had allowed himself to invest a bit of his heart into. Girls' attraction to Samuel had always confused Elyas. His hair was too red, his skin too pale, and his build too thin. The other boy had treated it like a game, laughing it up while Elyas nurtured a growing hatred towards someone his family loved like another son. Mercifully, the political problems that had plagued Samuel's house abated, and he had left for home once more, with Elyas uncertain of whether or not he knew just how much injury Elyas wished on him.   
  
Now, almost one year later, he was back. But why? To have a little bit of fun with his old victim? To seek refuge from renewed family disputes? Simply for old time's sake?   
  
Elyas shook his head and returned his thoughts to reality. The reason didn't matter one bit. Samuel could fuck whatever girl he wanted. Elyas' heart was set firmly on the Orc to his right, a woman whom Elyas had kept his interest in a total secret. And, if by some bizarre circumstance, she did catch Samuel's interest, he wouldn't dare make a move on the frighteningly savage woman. That only left Azug herself as an unknown variable.   
  
"You don't like red hair, do you?"   
  
She gave him an impatient look. "What?"   
  
"Nothing."   
  
More minutes ticked by with nothing but a few rickshaws and carts passing by. Despite his family being at the center of the city's economy, their home was far removed from its commercial centers. The hustle and bustle of the city was loud enough to reach the hill they were perched on, but quiet enough that even the distant sound of the sea beating at the shoreline often overtook it.   
  
That relative quiet allowed him to hear the beat of hooves on stone before he saw the horse they belonged to. A black stallion crested the slope hundreds of feet to his left, carrying a black-clad rider with neck-length red hair swept back over his forehead. He let out a shout and whipped the horse's reins, thumping his thigh-high boots into its flanks to drive it up the hill.   
  
"That him?" Azug asked, a rare and obnoxious sense of fascination in her voice.   
  
Elyas gritted his teeth. "Yes."   
  
Despite telling himself that he was over past hurts and old hatreds, merely seeing his old nemesis awoke all the emotions he had thought dead and buried. Baseless jealous gripped him so firmly that his heart pounded and hands shook. Cold sweat rolled down his brow, and his nostrils flared with each shallow breath.   
  
Samuel waved as he called for his horse to slow, and Elyas forced himself to wave back. He had resolved to come down here and put up a strong front, and still meant to do so. Two minutes, he told himself. Two minutes of smiling and reminiscing about the good old times, and then he could ignore Samuel for the rest of the week.   
  
"You're drenched!" Samuel grinned and stopped his mount a dozen feet from Elyas, then swung a leg over the horse's back and hopped off. "Have you been waiting out here for me?"    
  
There was something wrong with his voice. It was distinctly Samuel in its lyrical smoothness, but higher-pitched than Elyas remembered. His manner of dress had changed over the last year, too. He wore his usual black tunic and trousers, but with the addition of a shawl of black feathers that made him look like a raven. His pants were so tight that they clung to his thin thighs, and his usual ankle-length boots had been traded in for one's that went halfway to his knees.   
  
Most surprising of all, though, were his breasts.   
  
It took Elyas more than a few moments to process that fact. There they were, unmistakable in shape and contours, pushing out the fabric of Samuel's tunic. With that realization, a dozen more little changes revealed themselves. The softening of his features. The way he sashayed his hips when he walked. The curve of his waist. Even the way he - or rather, she - smelled was so feminine that Elyas simply couldn't register this person as the one he had known for so long.   
  
Samuel stopped before him and nabbed him in the shoulder. "I asked how long you were waiting for me. You look ghastly."   
  
Elyas was sure he did. He started at her stupidly for a moment, then finally managed to close his open mouth and find words that could express his confusion.   
  
"Who are you?" he exclaimed, taking a step away from the genderbent imposter.   
  
She clicked her tongue and closed the distance between them. "It's Sam! You can't tell me I look that different."   
  
He had never called himself 'Sam' in his life, as far as Elyas knew. Yet more evidence that this was some doppelganger who didn't quite grasp imitation of the human body and the importance of sexual characteristics.   
  
"I don't understand." He gave her another look over, as if that might help. It didn't - not one bit. The entire world took on a surreal quality, and he found himself caught between bursting out into laughter and fainting from shock.   
  
"Let’s go upstairs. It will be easier if I explain this once, in front of everyone."   
  
Elyas nodded and murmured something resembling an acknowledgement, but in truth had barely even heard her. Samuel went back to take her horse by the reins, then brought it back to the manor entryway and tried to hand it off to Azug, who remained as still as a statue. Only then did Elyas remember she was still present, and only then did he spot the death glare she was giving their visitor.   
  
Sam gave Elyas a concerned glance. "Does it speak our tongue?"   
  
Azug snorted derisively. "Doesn't look like a boy."   
  
"Ah, so you do." Sam thrust the reins into Azug's ample chest, but the Orc merely stared at them until they were withdrawn. "I suppose it's up to you, then." She handed them to Elyas, who took the leather straps without thinking, then turned and started up the winding cobble roadway towards the manor.   
  
"Hey, wait!" Elyas shouted after her pleadingly, realizing after only a few tugs that the stallion he'd been handed had no intention of moving. He turned to ask Azug for help, but his companion was already trailing behind Sam, leaving him to deal with his task alone. History was repeating itself - first as tragedy, now as farce.   
  
It took him twenty minutes and the help of two passing guards on patrol to get the horse up the roadway and tied up out front of the manor where a stable hand could go grab it. Elyas was happy to be rid of the thing, but dreaded going inside and participating in the sickly-sweet meeting between Sam and the rest of his family. Even from outside he could hear their surprised shouts change to joyous laughter as his old enemy's natural charisma smoothed over the shock of seeing a man having swapped genders like coats.   
  
Elyas forced himself through the threshold and into the manor foyer, where his parents and sister were speaking animatedly with Sam among the bust-topped pedestals lining the room. Red floral patterns covered the walls, reminding him of that glamorous brothel he had first met Azug in. The mental connection probably should have been the other way around, but that experience had left so indelible a mark that everything else flowed around it.   
  
"A magic spell?" his sister gasped. "How can that be?"   
  
Carol was clearly having more trouble coming to terms with this new reality than their parents. As much as Elyas, even. She had a hopeless crush on Samuel for the entirety of his two-year stay with them, during which time he had made no attempts to encourage her infatuation. Whether that was out of respect for Elyas' parents, a lack of interest, or a desire to be the hunter rather than the hunted, Elyas never knew. Perhaps it was just because such a dalliance wouldn't fit within the confines of the torturous game he had loved to play with Elyas'.   
  
"The downside to a life of adventure, I'm afraid." Sam's hand went to her chest and squeezed something just above her breasts, as if fingering a necklace. She finally noticed Elyas lingering at the room's entrance and waved him over, then launched into a recounting of what she had been up to for the past year. She spoke of family financial troubles, of desperate trade deals with distant lands meant to secure much-needed capital.   
  
And how, in a sand-swept street in a sprawling city in one of those distant lands, she had run afoul of a magic-wielding shamaness and been cursed with the body of a woman.   
  
“It’s reversible, isn’t it?” Carol picked up her dress and rushed towards Sam, then grabbed her by both shoulders. “Spells always have counterspells, or something of that sort! I read it in a book once.”   
  
Sam gives her an awkward smile and gently removes her hands. “I wish it were that easy.”   
  
“Oh, don’t make such a fuss about it!” Elyas’ mother put a comforting hand on her back. “I think he makes a terrific woman.”   
  
His father frowned and shook his head at the off-color joke, but Sam merely took it in stride and continued talking their ears off. It wasn’t his parents’ casual reactions to the change that were the strangest, but that of Sam herself.   
  
“When did this happen?” Elyas cut in.   
  
Everyone stopped talking and turned to face him.   
  
“When did what happen?” asked Sam.   
  
“This!” Elyas gestured up and down her body.   
  
“Ah! Three weeks ago.”   
  
That was far more recent than Elyas would have assumed. Gone a year, and within three weeks of having his life turned upside down he suddenly decides now is a good time to visit. The conversation continued on with Sam being inundated with questions by Elyas’ family until Elyas himself found an opportune moment to interject another niggling question.   
  
“How long did it take to get here from Tarbanth?” Elyas asked.   
  
Sam shrugged. “Two and a half weeks, with a few stops thrown in.”   
  
Carol gave her a puzzled look. “You were cursed and came straight here? Why not go home?”   
  
At that pointed question, Sam’s eyes went wide and she turned white as a sheet. Even her freckles seemed to be drained of their color.   
  
“Oh, enough!” Elyas’ mother went behind Sam and took her by the shoulders. “She’s scared of what they’ll say, the poor thing.”   
  
Sam lowered her gaze to the ground and gave a slow, solemn nod that Elyas simply couldn’t accept as genuine worry, regardless of how well it was performed.   
  
“You’re welcome here as long as you like,” said his father, turning his warm smile towards Elyas. “It will be just like old times.”   
  
  


 

 

* * *

  
  


Despite how much things had changed, ‘just like old times’ turned out to have been exactly right. Elyas’ family sat down for an early dinner in their dining hall, with the small group confined to one end of a massive mahogany table that spanned the length of the room. It was piled high with fruits, meats, and vegetables from every civilized land, and even some which had yet to benefit from the guiding hand of commercial enterprise. Azug, who would normally not have left Elyas’ side, was nowhere to be seen. Yet despite her conspicuous absence, he had the distinct impression that she was not far away.   
  
“Tell me...” Sam leaned over the armrest of her chair and bent forward to look Elyas in the eye. “Did you ever manage to get a girlfriend after I left?”   
  
All eyes were on him. Sam to his right, his parents to his left at the head of the table, and his sister across from him on the opposite side. Warmth flushed his face, partly from the wine, partly from embarrassment, and partly from fear that his muttered ‘no’ would get called out for the lie it was.   
  
“Oh, not to worry.” His father leaned back to loosen a belt that had been pushed to its limits by far too much venison and potatoes. “There’s nothing gold can’t solve. We’ll arrange something.”   
  
Elyas’ mother, who was clearly feeling the effects of one cup of wine too many, lurched forward with a mischievous grin plastered on her face. “And if all else fails, he can marry Samuel.”   
  
Carol gasped in shock and might have fallen from her chair if it weren’t for the armrests on either side of her. Elyas’ father groaned in exasperation at his wife’s off-color humor, and Elyas himself stared at his empty plate in utter mortification. The dinner had been so awkward that he had eaten everything handed to him simply to occupy his attention, but had failed to save something for the most embarrassing moment of all.   
  
The seconds ticked by, and no one said a word. Any moment now, Sam would come out with some suitably charming way to deflect the jest without making a single soul feel uncomfortable, as was her ability. It was only Elyas that she saw fit to make feel out of place, and then only on purpose. More time passed, and Sam made no noise other than to clear her throat. Elyas tore his eyes away from his fork to look at the woman next to him, whose eyes were as wide as the dinner plate she fixed them on. One hand tapped the table anxiously, while the other played at a fold in the fabric of her pants.   
  
For once, Elyas longed for the young man who could charm the pants off anyone and turn any tense silence into a chorus of jubilant laughter. Anything it would be better than this.   
  
And then, as if some higher power had finally saw fit to make reality conform to his wishes, he got the distraction he hoped for. The twin doors at the far end of the room swung open, smashing into the walls with a force that could only come from one of the Orcs hired as guards at the manor. Only one of whom was actually allowed within the manor itself.   
  
“Careful!” Elyas’ father shouted at Azug as she strode in. “That paneling is worth more than you make in a year!”   
  
He wasn’t exaggerating. Azug was paid a pittance, and Elyas could only assume that she stuck around in the job for lack of better options. He liked to think that he played a part in her desire to stay as well, whether from love or simply the fact that much of his allowance ended up in her coin purse, one way or another.   
  
Azug drew close enough to be caught by the evening light streaming in through the courtyard-facing windows, and Elyas’ winced with renewed embarrassment. She had discarded her usual brown leather tunic in favor of a far more revealing top whose black fabric began so low that her breasts looked poised to pop free with every step she took. The lack of a bra and thin material of her blouse made it abundantly clear just how close the top came to revealing her nipples. She wore uncharacteristically tight black pants instead of the baggy brown trousers that served to hide her massive endowment. thankfully, she had been smart enough to perform a tuck job beforehand. That knee-length cock crammed alongside her muscular thighs would have looked obscene beyond belief, and would have had his mother fainting alongside his sister.   
  
Azug stopped behind Elyas’ chair and put her lips beside his ear. “You come to my room. Now.”   
  
The rest of the guests eyed the pair curiously, though thankfully none but Elyas could hear her.   
  
“Were eating,” Sam fired back, twisting in her chair to face the towering Orc before lowering her gaze to Elyas. “Do you let all your servants order you about? Or just this one?”   
  
Elyas’ hadn’t thought the situation could deteriorate further, but he had been proven wrong already. Why not a second time? Here he had his inhuman secret lover ready to come to blows in front of his entire family, as well as his childhood tormentor who would love nothing more than to poke and prod the volatile Orc for no other reason than to cause trouble for Elyas. Doubly so if Sam could somehow sniff out just what exactly was going on between him and Azug, aside from their unconventionally lax Master-servant relationship. A dynamic which was often turned on its head within the confines of the bedroom.   
  
“Oh, she’s just excited for her language lessons.” Elyas’ mother slouched in her chair and flapped a bejeweled hand at Sam. “The beast is still too shy to try and speak to the rest of us, the poor thing. Elyas takes hours from his day to teach her. Isn’t he generous?”   
  
His parents had never treated Azug with the same respect they would have a human servant, but she always took it in remarkably good stride. With Sam, however, even that mild reproach had Azug’s jaw and fists clenched so tightly that Elyas was sure this meal would end in violence. Yet as much ill-will as he had wished on Sam, he didn’t want to see his head get snapped by an enraged Orc.   
  
“Soon, alright?” Elyas twisted back in his chair and gave Azug a smile that was meant to be comforting, but surely looked more terrified and pleading than anything else. He put a hand atop hers on the armrest as well, hoping that small, covert gesture would calm her down a bit.   
  
Azug let out a sharp breath through her nostrils, then turned her gaze from Sam to Elyas. “Now,” she said again, a bit louder this time. She slid a hand into his lap and squeezed his crotch before stepping away from his chair. Elyas may have been the only one who could feel her strong grip making stress toys of his balls, but Sam had seen every bit of it.   
  
“What the hell was that?” she exclaimed, mouth agape.   
  
Azug gave her a smug, lopsided grin and left the table side. Elyas fingers remained locked to the ends of the armrests where he was fairly certain he’d gripped hard enough to leave permanent indentations. His family looked between all three concerned parties in confusion, and all he could picture was Sam revealing what had just transpired under the table, with his family then piecing together every other suspicious circumstance they’d somehow failed to take notice of. Every surreptitious glance and late-hour rendezvous between him and Azug would be laid bare for what it was - not a professional relationship with the addition of a few study sessions, but a full-blown love affair in which he routinely got fucked in every hole imaginable by a shemale Orc three times his size.   
  
The thought of them finding out always wound his stomach up in knots, but here, where the danger was more real than ever, the threat of his sins being revealed stirred up his insides more terribly than Azug’s monstrous length. Rational thought vanished, and raw panic became his new logic.   
  
“I have to go!” he blurted out, shooting up from his chair with such speed that it tipped over backwards and slammed into the wood floor. Sam started to say something, either to him or his parents, but he had no intention of staying to listen. She would say what she wanted to, and all he could do was wait to suffer the consequences. The only thing on his mind in that moment was being as far from the consequences as possible, for as long as possible.   
  
Elyas ran after Azug, trailing behind her all the way from the courtyard-adjacent dining hall to the city-facing bedrooms on the west side. His strides covered half the length of her own, and by the time he reached his quarters she had already disappeared. The door to her adjoining room was closed as it had been earlier, while his was now cracked open.   
  
“Azug?” he whispered into the bedroom as he entered. The setting sun drenched everything in a warm orange glow, from his canopied bed to the balcony a few dozen feet past it. A door to his left connected his room to Azug’s much smaller one, but that was closed as well. It wasn’t a space that saw much use these days. He had invited Azug to sleep with him on a regular basis on the belief that it would take their relationship to some imagined next level, but all it had seemed to do was show both of them how difficult cohabitation could be. Their disagreements had grown more frequent, and Elyas nearly always ended up on the losing side. Sometimes that meant slinking off to her old bedroom to sleep under her coarse linen covers. He told himself that was because he, being of the more rational sex, should act as the conciliator during emotional times. In truth, his concessions came simply because of how damn scary she could be when worked up about something.   
  
The balcony curtains fluttered. He walked across the room and drew them over, and found nothing but a stiff breeze coming from the sea to the north. Below him stretched an expanse of flowered garden, and past that a high stone wall that separated his family’s estate from the city of Palina. He ran his eyes over the roadways to the docks, and calculated how long it would take him to find a captain to take him somewhere where neither family nor legal officials could lay hands on him for his crimes.   
  
But had he committed any? Palina had no laws against sodomy, but his guilt and panic were ratcheted to such an intensity that he was certain guards would break into his bedroom at any moment to slap the cuffs on.   
  
Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face back towards the bedroom. If the heavy touch wasn’t clue enough as to the culprit’s identity, than the green cleavage staring him in the face more than made things clear. Above those twin mounds, a scowling Azug glared down at him with a frustration he struggled to comprehend.   
  
“Why did you do that?” He threw his hands outward in utter exasperation. “Right in front of everyone!”   
  
Her nose twitched into a momentary sneer, and she thrust a finger into his chest. “You mean in front of her.” Another sharp jab pushed him out onto the balcony, and he nearly careened straight into the railing. “Why you say she’s a man when she’s not?”   
  
“She was a man!” Elyas said, taking a deep breath in and preparing to launch into the same outlandish tale Sam had told his family. “See, there was this curse...”   
  
Azug snorted and waved a hand through the air. “I heard already.”   
  
“Then what’s the problem? Do you think I’m going to fall in love with him just because he grew tits?”   
  
Without answering, she walked back into the bedroom, and Elyas followed.   
  
“We weren’t even friends, you know! All he did was torment me.”   
  
Elyas hadn’t bothered to delve into the specifics of that torment with Azug. It seemed a poor idea to lament lost loves with a jealousy-prone woman who had the strength to tear any number of body parts clean off his person.   
  
Azug went all the way to the other end of the room and closed the door Elyas had entered through, then locked it. Then, she fell on him, tearing off his shirt and tanking down his pants so forcefully that buttons clattered to the floor all around him.   
  
“What are you doing?” he shouted, lowering his voice to a high whisper halfway through the startled exclamation.   
  
The Orc was beyond words. She grabbed his cock through his underwear and fondled it roughly, then yanked his head back by his hair and thrust her tongue into his mouth. Their meeting of lips was over too soon to call the act a kiss, and seemed to be more a simple demonstration of the fact that she could do what she wanted to him, and that he lacked the power to stop it.   
  
“Will you knock it off?” He grabbed the waistline of his underwear to try and stop Azug from pulling it down, and for his efforts earned some rug burn on his fingertips when she pulled them down to his ankles in one go.   
  
“Why? We do this every night.” Azug fondled his ass even more roughly than she had his manhood, squeezing and kneading in circular motions with one hand while the other slid into the cleft between his cheeks.   
  
Elyas grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her hand away. “It’s not night.”   
  
“So?” She walked him towards the bed, forcing him to take stumbling steps backwards. “We gotta be secret? No one can know?”   
  
They both knew full well why their dalliances had to be kept under wraps, but Azug wasn’t one for well-reasoned arguments on the best of days. Now, she wasn’t listening at all. She planted her mouth on Elyas’ again, silencing his protests, then shoved him back-first onto his bed. He pushed himself up into a seated position to find himself face-to-face with the crotch of Azug’s breeches, which she had already begun to unfasten.

Azug slipped her fingers past the bush of wiry pubic hair peeking out of her pants and pulled up on the base of her cock until the first two inches of her flaccid length sat above her fly.   
  
“Suck it.“   
  
She had always been as short in speech as she was in patience, but now there was a venomous undertone to her command that made Elyas afraid to do anything to stop what was about to happen.   
  


Not that his fear mattered much after that first fateful breath. Her cock, as always, was positively rank. She knew how much a few days of poor washing down there left her stinking, but she  _ also  _ knew what that heady musk did to Elyas. It made him desperate, submissive, and pliable. Whenever she drew out that meaty length and lay it across his face, it only took a few moments for her scent and warmth to overcome whatever lingering reticence he might have held over being fucked raw by an Orc.

This time was no different, though Azug was far more insistent than usual. She slapped his trembling, hesitant hand away from her crotch and pulled her member out. With a few strokes she brought it to semi-hardness, then slapped it across his face and smeared precum across his forehead and the bridge of his nose.

“I know you want it,” she growled. “Go on. Beg.”

Elyas swallowed, careful to keep his lips closed lest some of that intoxicating elixir dripping from the head of her cock find its way into his mouth and render him further unable to think. He normally enjoyed the way her animal presence took away all the bothersome thoughts forced upon him by daily life, but not now. Now, he feared the inevitable moment her predations rendered him cock-hungry and cum-drunk. Azug might be little better than a wild beast when she took him into bed, but Elyas was reduced to something even lower than that.

He looked up at her with an expression he hoped she would find convincingly earnest. “I want to kiss you.”

She gripped her cock firmly around the base and slapped the tip on his lips. “You can kiss this.”

Azug lifted her cock slightly, allowing Elyas to loosen his pursed lips without risk of her member slipping into his mouth. After only a few moments’ thought, he arched his back, straightened his neck, and planted a long, slow kiss on the underside of her foreskin-covered head. Not in spite of his fear, but because of it.

It wasn’t only Azug’s physicality and domineering personality that frightened him. It was the ever-present fear that if he were to fail to be exactly what she wanted in a lover, she would leave him. Was that truly an unreasonable fear? There were, after all, hundreds of young men like him within the city. Were he to put aside the fact of his wealth and station, that number ballooned into the thousands.

There  _ were  _ others like Azug within the city. Some of them even worked as guards at his family's manor, and he knew for a fact that some if not all of them shared her masculine endowment - the Orc women had a fondness of pissing against whichever wall they stood nearest, and couldn't be bothered to check for passers by first.

But he didn't want them. He wanted  _ her,  _ and she knew it. Azug had him wrapped around her cock, and not only in the literal sense.

“Enough kiss.” Azug drew her hips back, then drove them forward, leaving a trail of slimy pre from Elyas’ chin to hairline. Even the little bit that made it into his mouth and nostrils was enough to have his head swimming and cock hardening.

His hand still trembled as he reached for her cock, but not from fear. Her cock was heavy, warm, sticky, and pulsed with each beat of her heart. It took no encouragement from Azug for Elyas to slide his lips over the swollen glans of her cock, pushing back her foreskin until his tongue was free to sweep around the sweaty and cum-basted flesh underneath.

Azug gripped the back of his head with one hand, grabbed her cock with the other, and fed him inch after inch of veiny Orc flesh. Her dick pushed up against the back of his throat, then took a detour downwards, filling his throat and creating a palpable bulge in his neck. Elyas took slow, deliberate breaths through his nose as he dug his fingers into Azug’s meaty hips, now skilled enough in sucking her off that he could do so with only a mild degree of panic.

“What was that?” Azug wrapped her fingers up in his hair and grinned down at him. “You ready for more?”

Ignoring the pleading look he cast up at her, she took his wet gurgling as an affirmative answer and continued sliding her cock down his throat. Once it passed his collarbone, he could no longer feel where the head of her cock lay. Only the thick shaft vanishing before his eyes told him just how much of her length remained.

After a few moments, all she had was buried firmly inside of him, stretching his jaw to painful dimensions and filling his mouth and throat so thoroughly that he could hardly breathe. Saliva pooled around the base of her shaft, tears welled in his eyes, thick black pubic hair tickled his nose, and the pungent odor of unwashed balls fucked with his brain and made him blissfully ignorant of just how much he’d be hurting when she was done with him.

Azug caressed his head with tender motions, but re-asserted her grip on his head with both hands when he tried to pull his lips away from her crotch.

“I change my mind. No sucking today.”

Elyas’ heart sank, and his hands slipped down her thighs. His early reticence was forgotten, overcome by a deep need to finish what he had started. Yet despite her apparent intent to cut short their depravities, Azug made sure to keep his face pressed to her groin.

Then, she relaxed. Her fingers spread out over his scalp, her buttocks unclenched, and she rolled her head back while letting out a long sigh. Her dick twitched in his mouth, then inflated slightly, as if even more blood were flowing into an organ that was already as hard as a rock.

Was she cumming, he wondered? Had she learned how to do so at will? The swell of her urethra and the growing warmth in his stomach led him to believe so. But as the flow of liquid continued, and as a strangely acrid taste worked its way up his windpipe, he came to realize just what it was she was depositing into his stomach.

Azug laughed as he dug his fingernails into her thighs and tried to push away.

“What you think that girl say if she see you like this?”

The flow of urine continued unabated, with Azug rocking forward on to her toes as Elyas recoiled in horrified shock. He didn't much care  _ what  _ Sam thought of him, but the idea of her having that sort of blackmail on him was enough to strike the fear of God into his heart.

“You want off?” Azug said in response to his pounding fists and scratching nails. “I pull out now and it's gonna go in your mouth. Breath gonna stink like piss and ale.”

That made him settle down. Being force-fed her rancid swill was bad enough, but with it being shot straight into his stomach he could hardly taste it. That would change if she dragged her cock out through his mouth mid-piss and hit his tongue with a blast of the stuff.

“You smart…” Azug let out a low, dark laugh. “Or maybe you like it. Maybe I find you whenever I gotta piss.”

Elyas shook his head from side to side, causing her cock head to slide up and down his throat. He would endure this to the end, but the last thing he wanted was for her to fall under the impression that he in any way enjoyed serving as her toilet. The weight and pressure in his stomach was growing nearly unbearable, and compounded the nausea he felt at the act itself. His stomach, already full from dinner, was now visibly bloated to the point that he looked like a pregnant woman just beginning to show.

Azug's member, which had begun to soften for lack of stimulation, gave a few more pulsating twitches within his throat before growing still. She gave a contented sigh, ran her hands over his head, then pushed him far back enough on her cock that he could stare up at her with bleary, tear-filled eyes. The look she gave as she spread her hands over the sides of his head spoke to all the sinful things she would do to ensure that he remained hers, and all the violent acts she would visit upon him if he ever strayed. There were times where Elyas might have found that sort of possessive desire comforting, but Azug’s jealousy had been inflamed to such levels that he now genuinely feared what she might do to him.

“You wanna talk to other women? Look at other women?”

Azug shoved back on his forehead, causing her cock to drag up his throat and pop free of his lips. A splatter of urine hit his tongue, making him gag and sputter as he fell back onto the bed.

“She gonna  _ know  _ you’re mine.”

Elyas’ eyes, squeezed shut as he tried to spit out the awful taste in his mouth, shot open as a massive hand gripped his neck and a sharp pain worked its way from his neck to belly button. Azug was kneeling atop him on the bed, holding up the bloody nail she had just raked across his torso. She threw herself atop him, pinning him to the bed with twin breasts that were nearly spilling free of their leathery confines, then begin grinding her flaccid cock against his abdomen. Each twitch of her sinewy muscles was a reminder of how powerless he was to stop what was coming, and the teeth holding his ear a thinly-veiled threat of what would happen if he were to try and escape. It took only a few crushing undulations for her dick to grow hard again, during which time the space between them had grown slick with precum. She worked her way down his body, stopping only when her rigid member dropped between his thighs and their faces met.

The impossibly broad cockhead parting his clenched buttcheeks told him exactly  _ how  _ she planned to make her ownership of him known… and felt.

“Azug!” He pushed back on her chest with all the strength he could muster. Which, considering her sheer size and musculature, wasn’t nearly enough to stop her from painting his unprepared anus in copious amounts of precum. Lube wasn’t necessary considering the sheer amounts of the stuff she produced, but she seemed to have no intent of starting him off with a finger or two. With her endowment, going in unprepared meant serious bodily injury that would have him bedridden for the next week. Which, considering her furious scowl and the way she squeezed his neck, might have been exactly what she had in mind.

“We should stop.” He winced and squirmed, trying to shift his buttocks away from her intruding member, but all he succeeded in doing was working her swollen head more firmly in between his cheeks.

Azug looked down at him, one hand supporting her bulk on the bed while the other remained wrapped around his neck. Not choking him, but remaining there as an ever-present reminder of the power she held over him.

“Make me,” she said darkly, her eyes flashing with animal ferocity.

Her muscles tightened, her hand squeezed his neck, and she took a long breath inward as she began to push forward. Elyas’ entrance tensed and spasmed against the massive invader trying to gain entry. He knew from experience that it was only a matter of time before it gave out. What would happen when it did? Would he scream? Would someone come rushing in to find the source of his horrible wailing, only to see him getting plowed up the ass by his inhuman bodyguard?

That would be the end of it. Azug would be fired - at the very least - and Elyas himself would be branded a pervert by everyone who came to know the depths of his depravity. His life, for all its short banality, would effectively be over, and the short-tempered woman who had made it exciting would be forced out of it.

“I said  _ stop _ !”   
  
Elyas swung a closed fist at Azug, catching her in the cheek. The blow was hard enough that her head turned with the force of the blow. When she turned back to Elyas, and her eyes opened, they were ablaze with a fury unlike any he had ever seen before. Azug rocked back into a kneeling position, then cocked her hand and swatted him across the face with the back of it. Stars exploded in his eyes, his head rang like a bell, and a sharp pain shot its way from forehead to cheek. It was only a slap across the face, but a slap from an Orc might as well have been a blow with a warhammer from the mightiest of knights.   
  
Elyas shouted in pain and brought his hands up to his face, and kept them there long after his cry had turned to mumbled groans of pain. She had broken something, he was sure of that much. Blinking his left eye was an experience in pain, and he could barely see the palm he held over it.   
  
Tentatively drawing a hand away from the uninjured side of his face, he leaned an elbow on the bed and dragged himself out from in between Azug’s thighs. She tried to grab hold of him, but a sharp hiss through his teeth and a wave of his hand warded her off. He made it to the edge of the bed and rolled his feet off so that he was sitting upright, then took a moment to feel at his left eye. He could still see out of it, but it was tender to the touch and nearly swollen shut. Luckily, it didn’t seem as if any bones had actually been broken.   
  
A series of shifting movements on the bed told him Azug was making her way towards him. She placed her hands on his shoulders and gently slid them onto his chest, but Elyas pulled free of her and shot up from the bed.   
  
“Get the fuck away from me,” he snapped, pacing about the room aimlessly with a hand held to the throbbing left side of his face. A creak came from the bed as Azug eased herself up from it, and Elyas’ one working eye fell on the door to her attached bedroom. He stormed over, threw the door open, and locked both doors to the room before resting his back against the door he came through and sliding down onto his buttocks. A heavy knock shook him to his feet.   
  
“Go *away*!” he shouted. Another knock came, and this time he didn’t say a word. More followed, growing weaker each time, and Elyas went over to the bed to sit down and massage his tender face.   
  
Minutes turned into hours, and the orange glow bathing the room was overtaken by the silver shimmer of a moon free of clouds. Throughout that time, Elyas found his mind assaulted by all of the feverish fears and worrying that would normally be confined to that twilight between the waking and dream world. Love, friends, family - all those problems that had seemed so small earlier that day became insurmountable enemies, any one of which could derail a life which had never run smoothly.   
  
Eventually, and a bit reluctantly, he picked himself up from the bed and opened the door to his room. It was dark and empty, and the door to the hallway was cracked open. He slipped inside and quietly shut the door to Azug’s room. Unfortunately, the only lock was on her side. It wasn’t something he’d considered a problem until tonight. To say he still feared her would be to overstate things, but he had no desire to see her, either.   
  
Elyas threw aside his covers and slipped inside his bed. A stiff breeze swept through the open balcony, and no amount of bundling himself up allowed him to reach a comfortable warmth. Eventually, his growing discomfort forced him from bed and brought him over to the balcony curtains. Just as he prepared to draw the heavy curtains closed, something pattered across the floor beside him. He knelt down and ran his palm across the floor, and found a small pebble. One from the gardens, it looked like.   
  
Pain exploded across his left temple. He dropped on to his buttocks, gasping in shock and feeling at the point of impact. A second rock, this one nearly the size of his fist, rattled on the ground between his spread legs.   
  
Shock gave way to rage, and Elyas shot towards the balcony railing. “I see you down there! Come out now, or I’ll send the guards to grab you!”   
  
In truth, he couldn’t see a thing. The labyrinth of hedges and stonework were a dark blur, with only the patch of grass right below him illuminated.   
  
“Can guests not take a nighttime stroll?”   
  
A shadowy figure emergeed from one of the canopied pathways and stopped just inside the better-lit area below Elyas. Sam looked up at him, her feather-trimmed coat shawl fluttering in the wind like the scruff of a raven. Her ever-present confident smirk was gone, replaced by a blank and inscrutable look that made Elyas more than a little nervous. How much did she know, and what did she want?   
  
“Why the hostile look?” she called up to him. “Did I interrupt a wet dream?”   
  
“You hit me in the face with a _ rock,” _ he hissed at her.   
  
Sam’s cheeks bloated outward, and she broke into uproarious laughter which she quickly quieted down to rasping cackles.   
  
“Yeah, yeah.” Elyas leaned on the railing and rubbed his throbbing head. “What do you want?”   
  
“I want you to invite me up, so we can talk.”   
  
Not a chance. The last thing he wanted was the two people he least wanted to see running into each other in the dead of night. If Azug returned, he would deal with her on his own.   
  
“Tomorrow. I want to sleep.”   
  
Sam clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels in a stance that matched her playful smile. “In front of your family? I would rather talk in private. So would you, I think.”   
  
Any illusions that Sam was not Samuel through and through were dashed in an instant. It was a classic move for her - to mock and threaten without explicitly doing so.   
  
“Fine,” Elyas snapped. “Stay there.”   
  
“Don’t make me wait!” she sang after him as he turned from the balcony and returned to his bedroom.   
  
Elyas fumbled through his wardrobe in the moonlit room, grabbing an embroidered tunic and loose pair of pants - he couldn’t see the color of either. After slipping on his boots, he made his way quietly through the halls of the manor, exiting out through the kitchens into the edges of the gardens. A cool wind whipped through the air just as it had on the balcony.   
  
The hedge maze ran around the main structure, and he traced the edge of the mansion with stucco walls to his right and gardens to his left until he was right below his bedroom balcony. Sam was nowhere to be seen, and the only movement within the gardens beside him was the slow trickle of a fountain some groundsman had forgotten to switch off.   
  
A hand touched Elyas’ cheek. He gasped, spun around, saw only a window looking into his sister’s salon room, then shouted in surprise when another hand tapped the opposite side of his face. Giggling laughter came from his right, and he whirled about to see Sam standing beside him, very much amused with his jumpiness.   
  
“Are you still afraid of the dark?”   
  
Elyas glared at her from the corner of his eye and took a deep breath in to steady his over excited nerves. “I was never afraid of the dark.“   
  
She tapped her chin in an exaggerated display of thoughtfulness. “As I recall, you used to be afraid of everything.”   
  
“What do you want?” he said, hardly giving her a chance to finish her biting remark. Both were surprised by the venom in his words.   
  
“As I said, I want to talk. It would help if you would look at me.” Sam circled around until her back was to the hedges, and Elyas could no longer hide the left side of his face from her without appearing absurdly suspicious. Her jaw dropped open and she tried to grab at his face to examine it more closely, but Elyas stepped away.   
  
“What in the hell happened?” she blurted out, just a bit too loud for his liking. The walls behind them were thick, but the weather cool enough that the servants would leave many of the windows open.   
  
“I told you.” Elyas pushes her hands away and moved away from the lamps illuminating the stone pathway behind Sam. “You hit me with a rock.”   
  
Sam scoffed. “Sure, a little pebble! That looks like...” She trailed off, her expression swiftly changing from bewilderment to anger. “Did someone hit you? Your father?”   
  
“What? Never!”   
  
Not for quite a few years, anyway. And even then, only when he had really deserved it.   
  
“That Orc! That one hanging around you this morning!”   
  
Elyas turned away from her with a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head, but he was too much of an open book to hide his flash of recognition from someone as sharp as Sam.   
  
“I’m right, aren’t I? What sort of bodyguard hits their charge?”   
  
Elyas began walking away from her at a swift pace, and Sam gave chase.   
  
“Did you tell your parents?” She grabbed hold of his wrist, digging her heels into sod to drag him to a halt.   
  
Elyas tore his hand away and spun about to face her. “Why can’t you leave me alone? What did I ever do to you?”   
  
The ferocity of his outburst cowed Sam into silence, and she shrunk into herself like a small animal seeking to make itself smaller in the face of a predator. Were this anyone else, Elyas would have felt ashamed. But Sam had made him feel small so often over the years that he couldn’t help but enjoy the reversal.   
  
“I just want to help,” she said. Her voice was impossibly small.   
  
“Really?” Elyas returned her look of fright with a mad grin. “And that’s why everything goes to shit the day you come back?”   
  
No reply came. The ensuing silence sapped Elyas of his righteous anger, until the tension of the moment grew too much for him to bear and shame came flooding in like a tidal wave.   
  
“I’m going to bed.”   
  
He started to leave, but Sam was already upon him, her boldness returned in an instant. “We don’t have to talk about that! I called you down about another matter.”   
  
“What?” he sighed, feeling utterly exhausted with the situation as a whole. It was too late an hour to endure the gamut of emotions Sam was putting him through.   
  
“Let’s sit down.” Sam gestured at a stone bench just inside the garden pathway, and led a reticent Elyas towards it before sitting down alongside him. They were further removed from the lamplight than before, making the black-clad Sam looked like a thin specter of smoke and shadow. Elyas could see well enough to know that she was staring at him, expecting him to be the one to show interest in whatever topic she had in mind, but he wasn’t about to be toyed with again. If she wanted something, she would have to come out and say it.   
  
“We haven’t had time to talk,” said Sam. “Just you and I.”   
  
That had been his goal since before her arrival. Unfortunately, her sheer persistence had rendered it impossible.   
  
“Why do  _ we  _ need to talk?” he asked her. It was an innocent enough question, but the choice of emphasis gave it a sharper edge.   
  
Sam tilted her head and flashed a shaky smile. “About this.” She ran a hand over her chest, exaggerating the slight swell of her breasts with a flowing rise and dip. “You haven’t said a word about my... accident. Well, with the exception of stammering like a mental invalid.”

“I’ve already heard the whole story. Dark tombs and ancient curses.” He started to rise from the bench, but a surprisingly strong tug on the arm from Sam brought him back down.

“Why are you being so difficult?” she said.

He glared at her and shook her hand from his arm. “Because I don’t know why you’re here! What is it that you  _ want  _ from me?”

She leaned away, seeming genuinely hurt by his biting question. When she next opened her mouth to speak, Elyas was quick to put a stop to any attempts at playing the hurt victim.

“And don’t say you just wanted to see me  _ that  _ badly.”

Sam glanced off to the side, drew her shoulders up, and sighed. “There’s an artifact that can help me. That can turn me into what I  _ should  _ be.”

“And you think  _ I  _ know where it is?”

For a few moments, she didn't answer. But the growing silence and Elyas’ demanding stare gradually coaxed the answer from her.

“I know where it is, but I have no way of getting there. It's weeks from here, and I've already run out of funds.”

So that's what it ultimately came down to - money. The fact that Elyas was being used like a piggy bank should have offended him, but there was something strangely comforting about this old tormentor of his having such straightforward motives for once.

“Why in God's name would I care to help you?”

Rather than seeming hurt, Sam gave him a sheepish grin. “Because we're the best of friends?”

Elyas raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Sam grew thoughtful, tapping her chin in mock concentration, then held a finger up and opened her mouth wide, as if struck by the finest idea imaginable.

“I'll let you touch my breasts.”

It wasn't the proposition he was expecting, but it was the one that perfectly suited her new body and old modus operandi. Brash, manipulative, and designed to set you off-balance for any future manipulation. The remainder of the night's negotiations played out in Elyas’ mind's eye, and ended with him poorer in both purse and confidence. It was a strange variation on a scene that had played out plenty of times before, each one having ended with him the loser. So, this time, he did the one thing neither him nor Sam expected - he took the bait.

Elyas reached out, placed his hand on Sam's left breast, and squeezed. With a sharp intake of breath and a full-bodied shudder, Sam drew herself inward and turned her body away from him.

“What in the hell was that?” she hissed.

His heart pounded and hand trembled from the bold move, but he did his best to feign nonchalance. “I was taking you up on your offer.”

“I said  _ touch,  _ not  _ brutalize.  _ That hurt!” Sam grimaced as she held a hand to her chest, but gradually her expression eased and she turned back to him. “I’d be willing to let you try again, if you promised to be gentle.”

“I’ll pass.”

Sam affected a slight smile, one broken by the lingering shock of the prior moment.

“You don’t want to see what it feels like? What it  _ really  _ feels like? You might never get this chance again.”

He bit his lip and reluctantly tore his gaze away from her chest. Two buttons had come undone when he groped her, leaving one of her breasts exposed enough that he could just make out the pink of her areola.

“I’ve touched a breast before.”

Sam scoffed. “That Orc? She’s not a  _ real  _ woman.”

“Neither are you.”

Never before had Elyas been hit with such certainty that he’d set exactly the wrong thing. The air between them seemed to grow electric, and Sam shook with a rage that Elyas could feel when she grabbed his tunic and yanked him close.

“And you’re not a real man!” she hissed, clearly struggling to contain her voice below a shout. “Letting that…  _ thing  _ fuck you? Disgusting! Pathetic!”

Elyas’ anger grew to match hers. He grabbed her wrist and tore her hand from his shirt, then squeezed for all he was worth as he loomed over her. The urge to do something to show how strong he’d grown and how weak she’d become was nearly overpowering. He wanted to shout her down, or slap her, or simply hold her there to make his superiority known.

Some distant rationality within him managed to push down those urges, and Elyas slowly eased his grip on her. Those dark instincts might provide some momentary satisfaction, but he knew that more than anything what he wanted - and needed - was to get away from her. He wanted to sleep.

“I’m looking forward to the day you leave,” said Elyas.

He rose from the bench and turned to leave. A dumbstruck Sam stood up in his wake, and stammered nonsense for a few moments before finally finding her voice moments before he walked out of earshot.

“I-I’ll tell!”

Her voice cracked and wavered, and she was forced to draw in a shuddering breath before speaking further.

“If you don't help me, I'll tell your parents what you've been doing with your servant.”

Elyas stopped midstep, boots grinding in the gravel as he slowly turned to face her. The urge to throttle her was stronger than ever. This time, only the sheer distance between them kept him from giving in. His jaw clenched, his hands tightened into fists, and a warm itch worked its way up his back. Righteous anger seeped from his every pore. The years hadn't softened Sam's callous manipulations. Rather, they'd sharpened her barbs into true weapons.

“I'll help you,” said Elyas.

Sam clutched one hand to her chest, pulling her shirt closed as she rocked forward on her feet in expectation of more words to come. The trembling of her arms told Elyas that she knew full well they would not be kind ones.

“After that, I never want to see you again.”

Elyas turned back towards the manor, and for a sliver of a moment caught the look of cold horror dawning on Sam's face. It was an expression he would never forget, and one he wondered about as he made his way back into the manor. Why did she make that sort of face, when she had gotten exactly what she wanted?

He needed to talk to someone - to hold someone. When he was a child, that person would have been his mother. Now, it was his girlfriend - or at least, that's what  _ he  _ considered her. Sam's passing shot about her peculiar endowment shouldn't have bothered him as much as it did, but her words stuck in his mind as thoroughly as her tortured expression.

Was this a relationship that he intended to continue indefinitely? It wasn't a question he'd seriously pondered. Hell, did  _ Azug  _ even intend that? Despite Elyas’ attempts to advance their relationship, it never seemed to move beyond the physical. Azug would routinely push the boundaries of what depravities Elyas was willing to subject himself to, but then refuse any attempts at couples activities that didn't involve her laying on top of him.

And as for  _ him  _ fucking  _ her? _

Forget it. The most he had gotten were blowjobs with only the barest hint of emotion behind them. Yet when  _ she  _ fucked  _ him _ , it was with a bestial desire that made him feel wanted and owned in a way words couldn't encapsulate. Was that the only way they would ever make love? What did that say about him as a man?

Despite being so lost in his own thoughts, his feet managed to lead him towards his bedroom, but stopped one door short of his intended destination. The door to Azug’s room was cracked, and a peak inside revealed that she was still gone. He entered the room, quietly closed the door behind him, then fumbled his way through the dark and sat down on her bed.

Terror gripped him as he considered the possibility that she had left the manor - and him - for good. She’d done it before, after all. It was during their first encounter that she’d confided in him that false rape charges had led her to flee her former home. Getting to know her better had only increased his worries that those charges weren’t as trumped up as she had made them seem.

Yet all he could think about in that moment was the fact that her travelling leathers weren’t sloppily draped over her clothes rack, as they usually were. He shot up from her bed and strode from the room, heart pounding and fingers twitching anxiously. Was this how it all ended?

  
  


 

* * *

 

 

  
  


Elyas knew the habits of the manor's servants as well as he did its halls, making it easy to avoid the old maids shuffling about the corridors like midnight wraiths. Azug was nowhere to be seen, though he truthfully couldn't think of where to search for her other than her room. Normally, if she weren't there, she would be by his side. 

Despite having only known her for just over a month, the vacuum she left was so unsettling that Elyas was near to panic when he finally found her. She sat at a long wooden table that ran down the center of the palace, hunched over a tankard that seemed to capture the entirety of her attention. Her brow, always heavy and often furrowed, was creased with such thoughtful intensity that she was sure to get a few new lines etched into her forehead.

Azug muttered something into her drink. Elyas edged closer, and gradually became able to make out her words.

“Cunt,” she spat. “Fucking bitch.”

So she could swear in a human tongue, now. That was new. The cursing went on like that until she finally became aware of his presence. She glanced over at him, stopped muttering under her breath, and returned her gaze downward. His desire to approach her was tempered by the sight of those thick muscles rippling underneath her leathers, and the all-too-fresh knowledge of what she could do if she was in the mood to lash out again.

“Have fun?” she grunted at him.

Elyas frowned. Nothing about tonight had been fun, and the way this conversation was starting out lead him to believe that it wasn't going to get any better.

“Fun with  _ what?” _

“Talking,” she snapped, as if the word were another swear. “Talking to woman at night, in the garden.”

Elyas scowled at her. “A man  _ trapped in a woman's body…  _ and I can talk to whoever I want!”

Azug brought the mug up to her lips, then, finding it empty, slammed it down onto the table hard enough to make Elyas jump. That was sure to have woken a few of the lighter sleepers.

“Maybe I should talk to people, too. Your sister like me… always laughing, touching, smiling…”

She turned to face him, a cruel smile spread across her face as her head tipped slightly from side to side and she wobbled uneasily on the stool. She was drunk. Rather than excuse her threats, it made it frighteningly likely that she might try to follow through on them.

“You stay the hell away from her!” He thrust a finger at her and took a few steps forward, careful to manage his volume better than the Orc.

“Why?” she bellowed, banging her mug again for emphasis. “You wanna talk to whoever you want? Maybe I fuck whoever I want! Someone who don't tell me 'no’. Someone who isn't asking me to let them fuck me.”

So there it was. This drunken tirade wasn't just about him talking to an old acquaintance for whom he held not the slightest romantic feeling. It was about Elyas having the gall to insist on being something more than a hole for Azug to fuck whenever the mood struck her. The 'relationship’ he thought they'd created was an illusion. A black eye and a drunken fit were the sole fruits of his labors.

“Fuck whoever you want outside of these walls. You're done here, and I'm done with you.”

And with that, he turned and left. The moment he passed the kitchen threshold, the room erupted in a roar of angry shouts and broken wood. Not wanting to be noticed by whichever poor bastards came to investigate the ruckus, he sped up his walk and took a different route back to his room, one which was less likely to have him passing any guards. As he passed the moonlit windows, a plan began to form in his mind. Azug's drunken rage would see her fired, and if she tried to tell anyone about the two of them, he would simply shrug and say she was lying.

It was such a beautiful plan in its simplicity. Why had he ever been worried?

His heart sped up as he walked the outer halls of the manor, less out of fear of the future and more from a strange sense of freedom. It was exhilarating, being free of the worries that had plagued him endlessly over the last month. No more worry about getting caught in the throes of coitus, or wracking his brain in a futile attempt to figure out how to turn a perverse indulgence into something moral and meaningful.

Halfway back to his bedroom, a muffled whimpering broke the tranquility of the night air, which had grown quiet of Azug's rampage. With each door he passed he listened, finding that the horrid sound cast a weight on his shoulders that grew heavier with every second he listened. Finally, at the third door, a grand oaken thing that led into a guest bedroom nicer than his own, he found the source of the shuddering anguish. The woman inside was crying - sobbing, even. The only reason her grief did not reach the adjacent bedrooms was that she seemed to be muffling it with a pillow. With his ear pressed to the door, though, Elyas could hear every choking sob produced by his family's unwanted guest.

He tore himself away from Sam's bedroom and continued down the hall, walking with a lurching step and heavy legs that felt as if they had weights tied to them. His heart, which once leapt with a frightful exuberance that placed it in his throat, sunk deep into his stomach. Hope turned to despair, righteous anger warped into cold guilt, and he slunk back to his room with his head hung low.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Elyas did not sleep that night. He tried to, yes, but a few hours spent laying in bed and being assaulted by the memory of Sam's bawling led him to conclude that he would enjoy no peace while the moon still shone. So he got out of bed, went to his balcony, and thought. He thought about a great many things - of past, present, and future. Of how he and Sam had once been something close to friends. Of how old, childish hurts plagued him into young adulthood. Of what sort of man he would become if he let them continue to do so.

And as he turned away from the night sky and left his room, he thought of how thoroughly he was sure to regret what he was about to do.

The next morning came quickly, bringing with it the sun and the noise of commerce from the nearby city. Elyas had concluded his hasty preparations, and sat on the driver's bench of his borrowed wagon, reins in hand and head bowed with the weight of utter exhaustion. He had filled water skins, loaded the vehicle with supplies, and hitched the horses, all without the aid of the servants who had, up until an hour ago, been fast asleep. Pride and a sense of accomplishment had softened the mental pain of dull labor - it was the most he'd ever used his hands - but weren't helping fight back physical exhaustion.

One of the nearby horses brayed. Not one of the two hitched to the wagon's front, but the one tethered to the back. Sam's black stallion pulled at it's rope, trying to run towards its owner as she slinked out from one of the manor's side exits. A set of saddlebags were slung over her shoulders, full of those few belongings she had brought with her. It took only a few steps for her to spot Elyas atop the loaded wagon and stumble back in slack-jawed surprise.

“I've been waiting all morning,” said Elyas. “Are we doing this, or not?”

Sam eyed him in disbelief for a few moments, then hardened her expression and cast her gaze towards the ground before making her way slowly to the rear of the wagon. It wasn't the enthusiastic start to a grand quest that he had envisioned in his sleep-deprived delirium, but the shifting of the wagon as she clambered in told him that she had at least accepted his gesture of apology.

Anything more would have to come later.

Just as Elyas clicked his tongue at the horses and prepared to give the reins a light whip, the wagon rocked again and Sam ran past him towards the household.

“I'm leaving a note!” she shouted back at him. “For your parents!”

 

* * *

 

 

 

When Azug awoke, her world was one of unending pain. The sun shone down on her from directly overhead, causing her to snap her eyes shut a moment after she’d opened them. A dull ache throbbed in her head with each beat of her heart, and the soft chirp of birds was like listening to steel blades grind against smooth stone. The bush she lay in scratched at every inch of exposed flesh, and the boot she’d lost had left one foot open to the night air, leaving it numb with the early stages of frostbite.

With a shuddering groan she rolled over onto all fours, then pulled herself from the flattened bush she’d collapsed in early that morning. The manor wall towered to her back, and flowering hedges hid her from view of the rest of the grounds. As she considered her present situation, the past came flooding back in full force. The prior evening was shrouded in a drunken haze, but she remembered enough to know that she had said things which, even then, she knew would only make matters worse.

So why had she said them?

Because they were the truth. Because Elyas had forced her into anger by cozying up to that stick-woman and demanding Azug do things she didn’t want to do. He wants to fuck? Then he can fuck his own hand, and be happy she allows him to kiss her feet. Let him try and find another Orc so strong, and beautiful, and hung.

Azug roared in frustration and stripped off her remaining boot, then flung it over the wall. Raw fury cleared away the worst of her hangover, and she stomped her way through the manor gardens to go see just what sort of damage Elyas had made her do. When she sees him, she won’t speak to him. If he gives her the cold shoulder, then she will pretend he doesn’t even exist. And if he speaks to the stick-woman again, then Azug will bring someone back to her room and fuck them so loud that he’ll be driven mad next door.

As she enters the manor’s side door and makes her bleary-eyed way through the halls, she considers what sort of fucktoy would best make him jealous. A woman, or a man? Yet as she ponders her method of justice, her mind turns again to Elyas’ pained expression that night prior, and she wonders just what sort of revenge  _ he  _ might be planning.

Azug picks up her pace with each step, until she’s careening through the household on a mad rush to Elyas’ room. She throws open the door and races over to his bed, burying her face in his sheets and drawing in a deep breath through her nose. There’s no sign of that woman’s stench, nor any smell other than Elyas’ sweet scent. 

That much is comforting, but as Azug rises to her feet and takes a good look at the room around her, she realizes something that has her heart pounding hard enough to turn her headache into a full-blown migraine. His wall-spanning closet, once full of more clothes than Azug had ever owned in the entirety of her life, was now nearly empty. Only a few lonely garments remained. The rest was… where?

In a flash of horrifying inspiration, she went back into the hall, barreling past startled maids and awestruck guards as she made her way to the room the stick-woman was staying in. There, she found not what she feared - that Elyas had moved his belongings in with her. Rather, she discovered something even worse. Open closets, a freshly-made bed, and a room that still bears the scent of the woman who left it behind, taking Elyas with her.

The strength drained from Azug’s legs, and she wobbled perilously before leaning on the oaken desk beside her to support herself. Her hand met a folded piece of paper, and she eyed it curiously for a moment before picking it up and opening it.

_ Thank you for letting me stay with you for these past few days. Your family’s generosity means the world to me. I am sorry I could not remain longer, but my quest calls. I hope you don’t mind me stealing Elyas from you. _

The words were hard to read, and harder still to understand. Her language lessons, though frequent, had focused more on speaking than reading. It didn’t help that her teacher was too demanding, too impatient, and a traitorous bastard with an unfaithful heart.

“Stealing… Elyas.”

Azug sounded out the words over and over, her vision drifting upwards as realization struck her for the final time. Her lover, not run off, but kidnapped. Not seduced, but stolen. Not having betrayed her, but having  _ been  _ betrayed by a woman who Azug knew was a snake from the moment she laid eyes on her.

She squeezed the note in her fist and dropped it to the floor, then turned and marched out into the hall. On her way to the other side of the manor, and the horse stalls, she passed the kitchens, where a group of humorless servants were busy cleaning up a mess unlike any Azug had ever seen. Pots and pans lay everywhere, food covered the walls, and the waist-high table running down the middle of the long room was broken clean through at the halfway point. 

She dimly remembered playing a part in that the night before, but gave the matter little thought as she shoved aside the furious chef who screamed at her to explain herself. He ran off, swearing to tell the house’s masters who would have her fired, and Azug continued out towards the stables. 

None of this was her fault, but she would make it right anyway.


	5. Out Of The Frying Pan

By the time the sun hung directly overhead, they had yet to even make it out of the city. Their first waystop - the inland city of Omakos - necessitated a trip through the sprawling suburbs of Elyas’ homeland, rather than a route that bypassed the packed city. That meant traffic jams, aggressive beggars, spooked horses, and the growing fear that he had left some crucial loose end undealt with back home.

 

Elyas knew _who_ that loose end was. He just didn't know what she would do to make a mess of his life in his absence. All he could do was hope that his parents refused to listen to whatever lies - or truths - she had to tell about him, and that she would peaceably removed from their employment after they discovered the results of her drunken fit.

 

“Why do we need to go to Ilatar?” Elyas said back into the wagon. “Surely there's someone _here_ who can remove the curse.”

 

He felt Sam lurch up from her bench, and looked back in time to see her poke her head out through the wagon's front flap.

 

“Do you think I’m doing this for fun?” she snapped. “That I planned a weeks-long journey before doing my due diligence?”

 

Elyas gave her a tired look and said nothing. Sam sighed.

 

“Ilatar is the last stop before the Chatran Jungle,” she sighed. “We can’t well venture into the wilderness without a guide and provisions.”

 

Would the wagon have had footbreaks of some sort, Elyas would surely have slammed on them as hard as he could. But as it was, all he could do was stare slack-jawed at Sam as the horses in front continued trotting aimlessly through the streets without the benefit of guiding hands on the reins.

 

“The Chatran Jungle?” he shouted, his voice so loud that it managed to rise even above the din of the crowded roadway and draw more than a few stares. “You never said anything about that! I thought this trinket you wanted was in Ilatar!”

 

Sam’s brow furrowed in annoyance. “What would a magical treasure be doing in the middle of a city? Did you think we’d swing by a jewelry store and pick it up?”

 

Elyas sputtered incredulously. “That's _exactly_ what I thought!”

 

“Well, I can't be blamed for your poor reasoning. Think! Use your brain!”

 

His only response was to shake his head in disbelief, after which he returned his attention to the horses pulling their lumbering wagon. This was certainly shaping up to be a true adventure, which was not at all what he'd expected or desired. What he _wanted_ was to help Sam out so that he stopped feeling so damn guilty. Apparently, that would mean hacking through jungle thickets while he prayed their local guide didn't murder them and rob their corpses.

 

After a great deal of silent lip-chewing on Elyas’ part, Sam spoke up again.

 

“If you're scared, it's not too late to leave. I can go myself, after all. A lone woman in barbaric lands.”

 

Elyas nearly let slip another snide jab at her bizarre gender situation, but quickly thought better of it. That seemed to be a sore spot, and he could hardly blame her. What a horror it must be to be trapped in the wrong body. For months on end, no less.

 

“I'm not having second thoughts.” Elyas gripped the reins more tightly and gave the horses a light whip. “I just wish you would have told me that earlier.”

 

They could risk a bit more speed now that they were free of the worst of the city's traffic. With any luck, they'd be able to make one of the outlying towns by nightfall. There was something immensely dissatisfying about the prospect of spending the night in the same city they'd set off in that morning.

 

“Well, maybe you should ask more questions.”

 

Elyas shrugged. “Maybe I should.”

 

There _were_ questions burning a hole in his mind, begging to be asked. Questions like why someone he had once considered a good friend had been turned into a tormentor by the currents of adolescence. Elyas might have found love by now if it weren't for Sam's sabotage of every burgeoning relationship he'd ever had. At the very least, he would have lost his virginity a bit sooner - and to a human woman.

 

He decided he didn't want to know why their friendship had gone so sour. It had died, and that was that. Their relationship would never be what it had been, no matter how many heart-to-hearts they ended up having on this trip.

 

“What have you been doing since you left?” said Elyas.

 

“Treasure hunting. I thought it might be an interesting diversion. That's where I acquired this.”

 

Sam held up her right hand, angling it so that Elyas could see the silver band wrapped around her right ring finger.

 

“An engagement ring?”

 

She lowered her hand, then clambered over the divider and took a seat beside him on the driver's bench. The black feathers of her coat rippled in the wind, standing in stark contrast to the thin, alabaster neck she stretched from side to side. After loosening out the kinks she'd earned in the back seat, she raised her right hand again.

 

“A _cursed_ ring. That's what did _this.”_ She swept her hand over her body, outlining the feminine curves of her lithe figure.

 

Elyas would have expected a bit more shameful reticence in describing the details of her transformation. More surprising than that was learning that the curse was tied to something as innocuous as a ring.

 

“Can you not just take it off?”

 

He let go of one of the reins and reached for Sam's hand. The moment she realized what he was doing, all color drained from her face, and her eyes went wide with fright.

 

“Stop!” she shrieked, shrinking away from him.

 

Elyas recoiled in shock, then watched in stunned confusion as Sam hunched over her trembling hand and tugged ineffectually at the ring. After a few moments, she composed herself enough to sit up straight and hold her hand out to him.

 

“It won't come off. See?”

 

She lifted up the ring finger, and Elyas hesitantly gripped the piece of jewelry between his fingers and gave it a light pull. Just as when she herself had tried, he wasn't able to shift the thing a single millimeter on her finger. It was less as if it was glued to her, and more like he couldn't get a grip on it in the first place. In a flash of gruesome thought, he wondered if she could be rid of it by severing the afflicted digit, but quickly dismissed the idea. She already had a solution in mind, and there was no guarantee that such a… _straightforward_ attempt to combat a magical curse would succeed.

 

“So,” said Elyas. “You think you've found the means to cure your… condition?”

 

Sam tucked her right hand back by her side, hiding the ring from view.

 

“I know I have. There's another ring, crafted by the same ancient people that created mine. Its counterpart. All I have to do is put it on.”

 

A simple enough task, although reaching their final destination was another matter entirely. The sun had dipped down from its position directly overhead, and now skirted the tallest of the bronzed rooftops looming above them.

 

“Well, I hope it works. I can't imagine what it's like, being stuck in the wrong body.”

 

His comment was met by nothing but the clip of hooves against the ground, the groan of their vehicle as it rolled over uneven cobbles, and the droning roar of a busy city. Worried he'd again said the wrong thing, Elyas glanced over to see Sam staring down at her joined palm, brow furrowed in frustration and eyelids pressed together tight. Finally, she opened them and looked at him with an expression of strained geniality.

 

“Tell me what you've been doing since I left,” she said. “I want to hear everything.”

 

So, he talked. Not that he told her everything - he left out any mention of Azug, partly because he knew it would set her off but mostly because he himself didn't want to think about the Orc for the time being. Sam nodded along, often stopping him mid-sentence to ask probing questions that shocked him with their invasiveness.

 

“Has my family spoken of marriage?” echoed Elyas. “Just loose talk. They don't have anyone in mind. Not as far as they've told me, at least.”

 

“And I take it there's no one _you_ have in mind, either?”

 

It was only a day prior that there had been. Even then, the idea of marrying Azug had seemed ridiculous, though he'd often fantasized about the possibility of eloping. Running off into the hinterlands with his massive bride in tow was quite a bit more realistic a prospect than somehow convincing his family to accept their union.

 

Not that it mattered now.

 

“No,” he said finally. “How could there be? I've hardly dated.”

 

A fact that Sam was partly to blame for. He couldn't completely discount his own social awkwardness in his early years for his lack of romantic success, but his once-friend certainly hadn't helped matters. Every time he seemed poised to be getting somewhere with a young lady, Sam - back then, Samuel - would swoop in and sweep her off her feet with dizzying speed.

 

Those memories of lost loves and fruitless crushes put a sour taste in his mouth, and his face contorted into a frown that Sam took quick notice of.

 

“What? Don't tell me you blame *me* for that.”

 

She leaned forward and gave him a good-natured grin, which he returned with an unhappy glare.

 

“Oh, they weren't right for you anyway,” she said.

 

Elyas bit his lower lip and whipped the horses hard enough to make them whinny, making them speed up into a fast trot. He felt bad about striking them in anger the moment he did it, but that didn't stop him from raising his voice to the woman beside him.

 

“Because I'm not well-bred? Tall enough? Handsome enough? They certainly seemed to like me until _you_ came in and fucked it all up.”

 

Sam put her hand on his arm.

 

“That's _not_ what I meant.”

 

He shrugged her off with an annoyed huff, and she abandoned her attempts at making nice in favor of staring off in the opposite direction and passing the trip in silence. The next time she spoke up, it was to ask him to stop at a marketplace they were passing so that she could use one of the public outhouses. He obliged, and when she returned a few minutes later, she clambered into the back of the wagon, and stayed there.

 

That worked just fine for Elyas. He was beyond frustrated with Sam and her total lack of empathy, and the exhaustion brought on by a day's worth of travelling wasn't making it any easier for him to deal with her. The further they got from the city main, the lower the sun sunk in the sky, and the more he just wanted to find an inn and rest.

 

It wasn't long after the sun disappeared beneath the horizon that Elyas came across a suitable stopping point. They had reached one of the city's satellite suburbs, a poor district known for its masonry work. A nearby quarry had the streets reeking of dust and sulfur, and the poorly-lit sidewalks were filled with all manner of suspicious characters shuffling from one hovel to another.

 

But it was the last suburb before miles upon miles of endless farmland and forest… and it had an inn. That was good enough for Elyas, whose buttcheeks were so sore from driving that it caused him no small amount of pain to pry himself off the driver's seat. Sam joined him beside the wagon, looking obnoxiously upbeat - as if she had already forgotten their earlier argument.

 

“I'm getting us rooms, and then I'm going to bed.”

 

“Here?” she asked as he leapt down to the cobblestones. “It looks a bit… grim.”

 

He patted the pouch of gold coins strapped under his shirt to ensure it hadn’t wandered off, then made his way towards the entrance. Their wagon would need to go somewhere safer before they laid down for the night.

 

“It does,” he said back to her. “Watch our things, will you?”

 

Sam scoffed in disbelief and jogged after him, arguing with his choice of stopping point even as he pushed open the swinging doors that led into the inn. A wall of hazy smoke billowed out to meet him, and his senses were immediately assaulted by all of the sounds and smells that had seemed so subdued just outside.

 

The place reeked of cheap ale, and a chorus of cackling laughter echoed off of every wall. The first level was packed to overflowing by tough-looking women, tougher-looking men, and a more eclectic mix of species than Elyas had ever seen. Elves hunched over corner tables in quiet conversation, half-naked goblins danced on tables for human sailors, and a lithe Orc pounded her fists on the bar counter while shouting obscenities at an unamused barkeep.

 

Despite the diversity of the establishment, the first instance of eye contact he made with one of the scarred patrons gave him the distinct impression that this wasn’t a place that would give him a warm welcome. That feeling only intensified with each pair of eyes that fell on him, one after the other, until all but the most drunken and merry were staring at him with obvious distaste. Sam gripped his sleeve, he grabbed his coin pouch through the fabric of his shirt, and wondered if it perhaps would have been better to risk countryside bandits than city-dwelling ruffians.


	6. Fancy Meeting You Here

Elyas took Sam by the arm and backed towards the door, which hadn't even had time to swing shut yet. His attempt to back away from the unwelcoming stares leveled at them was interrupted by a roar of rowdy laughter just outside, followed by a group of disheveled laborers who barged their way in and nearly ran straight into the two unwanted patrons.

 

Their laughter ended, and the person at the head of the group - a mustachioed man with more scars on his face than hairs on his head - gave them a quizzical look that turned hostile once he saw the reactions of those elsewhere in the tavern. Elyas met his scowl with a tight-lipped, apologetic smile, swallowing hard as he considered just how to defuse a situation that no longer seemed possible to escape from. The Orc was the only patron who had still failed to take notice of them, as she was too busy shaking the bar against the floor and demanding the barkeep pour her another drink.

 

“What’s a rich prat like you doin’ in a place like this?” said the man. He folded his well-muscled arms and stared down the bridge of his nose at Elyas, a pose quickly mimicked by the men and women who had followed him in.

 

Elyas tried to utter a response, but nothing came to his mouth but wordless stammers. When given a choice between fight or flight, his mind had taken the third route and opted to freeze entirely. More of the workers filtered into the bar, creating a wall of dirt-and-sweat covered bodies that they couldn’t possibly hope to flee through. From the corner of his eye he saw Sam cowering lower, hunching her back and casting her eyes toward the ground. Even as a man she hadn’t been physically imposing, and as a woman looked positively frail among those hardened bodies seemed positively frail.

 

Her fingers dug deeper into the flesh of his arm and shoulder, pulling on the hidden purse strap that ran diagonally over his torso. His mind turned from abstract fears of being outnumbered in a strange place, to the more practical danger of being beaten and robbed. Were he to lose that money, their journey would be over before it even began.

 

But  _ perhaps  _ there was a way to only be parted from some of their funds.

 

“I'm here to…” Elyas swallowed the lump in his throat and put on a smile he hoped wouldn't appear obnoxiously aristocratic. “Buy you all drinks?”

 

The workers exchanged befuddled glances, then in almost supernatural unison, let out a raucous cheer that shattered the tense silence. They swept forward as a group, carrying Elyas and Sam with them to the bar, where Elyas hurriedly fished a stray gold ducats from his pocket. The larger coin pouch beneath his shirt remained hidden, and the two of them unharassed, other than some good-natured jostling from the soon-to-be drunks whose merry night he had just funded. By the time it was all done, the tavern had taken on its prior energy, with Elyas and Sam left largely ignored, other than a few curious glances here and there.

 

Well, other than the Orc. Her eyes had remained locked to each ducat that passed from Elyas’ hand to the barkeep's, straying only to follow the mugs of ale that were taken by the workers to their table. After that she simply leered at Elyas’ himself, matted black hair a mess and muscular legs swaying to and fro like a ship's sail. She sauntered over to Elyas, rolling her shoulders back and thrusting out her breasts as she neared him. Though shorter and leaner than Azug, the very fact of her race brought to mind every trait he associated with Azug - fickleness, strength, simplicity of mind, and most of all, raw sexual power.

 

“Ah, human...” the Orc slurred, leaning on the bar for support while drool spilled out from either side of her tusks. 

 

Azug might not have been the most put-together or proper of ladies - if one could call her such a thing - but next to this plastered Orc, she could have passed for an Elven princess. The Orc lurched towards Elyas, knocking over empty glasses with her elbow as she went. Her spicy stench was far too overpowering to be enticing, and the frothy slobber hanging from her lips made him reluctant to look up at her and risk getting some in his eyes.

 

“Human got a lot of coins. Gonna buy me drink too?”

 

She grabbed for Elyas, but he deftly sidestepped her inebriated attempt to get hold of the walking bag of money she'd apparently marked him as. That had her sneering in displeasure, and she grew more unhappy when a puffed-up Sam moved in between the two.

 

“Don't you know better than to lay hands on your betters, greenskin?”

 

The Orc responded to Sam's racially-tinged remark by grabbing the smaller woman's arm and tossing her to the floor. Sam slid into a pair of occupied chairs a few feet away, upsetting the two men seated there. Elyas tried to dart past the Orc to help his travelmate, but she grabbed hold of him before he could get out of reach.

 

“Make it worth your while,” the Orc panted into his face. Her free hand planted itself on his abdomen, then slid downward until her palm rested on his groin. “Human wanna see how Qorza fuck?”

 

She squeezed his package through his pants, making his balls ache even as his cock throbbed in expectant need. Being manhandled in front of a hundred laughing bargoers was humiliating enough, but getting hard while every other aspect of his being recoiled in disgust burdened him with a deeper shame still.

 

“Get the fuck off of me!”

 

He tried to shove her away, but even an Orc of slight build and below-average height dwarfed him in lean musculature. A playful fire flared in her eyes, and she flashed a few yellow teeth at him in a demented half-grin. She wrestled him into the bar, and when he yanked on her matted head of hair, shouted in pain and spun him around, slamming his face into the countertop.

 

“She's got him now!” someone to his rear said. Judging from the chorus of laughs that followed, the altercation had gathered quite the audience.

 

“We gonna skip the drink,” Qorza said into his ear. Her breath was hot and heavy, and stank of the same cheap booze as the rest of her. Elyas was too enraged to give much thought to the soft mass pressing into the top of his buttocks, but even through her pants he could tell Qorza was working with the same equipment as Azug.

 

“You come back to my barracks bunk, or I hurt you real good.” With one hand holding his arms across his back, she used the other to reach around his waist and give his groin another squeeze. “Maybe you wanna get hurt good. Pretty little thing, smell like flowers...”

 

Qorza buried her nose in his hair and drew in a long, deep breath that made her cock harden and breasts push against his back. Then, like that, it was over. Her hands were free of her unbreakable hold, and her awful stench wasn't nearly as overpowering. Elyas whirled around to face her, expecting - and hoping - to see that Sam had broken a bottle over the Orc's head.

 

Instead, he saw Sam standing roughly where she had fallen, and the Orc beating a hasty retreat towards the door for no discernible reason whatsoever. Qorza gave one last look back before slipping out into the night, as if making sure that  _ he  _ wasn’t following  _ her. _

 

The righteous anger in his heart screamed at him to chase after her and give her the beating she deserved. Then, the confused tavern-goers turned their attention back to their own tables, and he found the strength leaving his body along with the adrenaline pumping through his veins, leaving only mental and physical exhaustion. He slid onto a high stool and leaned his elbows on the bar, staring vacantly at the wall as he processed the fact that he'd just nearly been raped in full view of dozens of people, and they'd thought it more funny than horrific. Was this what the world was like outside of the bubble of his privileged upbringing?

 

“Are you alright?”

 

Sam walked up beside him, holding her left arm with the opposite hand and looking just as shell-shocked as he felt. A brief flash of frustration had followed when he saw that she hadn't done a thing to intervene when that Orc was fully prepared to tug down his pants and plunge herself into his ass, but it was quickly overpowered by the shame of his own inability to stop her. Only Qorza's drunken capriciousness had saved him from a humiliating and painful end to their first night on the road.

 

“I'm getting us rooms, and then I'm going to bed and locking my door. I recommend you do the same.”

 

Elyas motioned for the barkeep, whose attention was occupied by another group further down the bar. It was amazing how invisible he became once he was no longer a source of free liquor nor bawdy entertainment.

 

“ _ Rooms?”  _ Sam grabbed him by the arm and leaned in to speak in a low whisper. “I'm not sleeping alone. Not a chance!” She jerked her head at the door the Orc had left through. “If that can happen to you, how do you think a  _ woman  _ will fare here?”

 

With a great sigh borne of combined frustration and tiredness, Elyas dug his forehead into his palms and rolled his eyes.

 

“You're  _ not  _ a woman.”

 

Sam shoved against his back so hard that she nearly knocked him from the stool.

 

“Everyone else sees me as one, and you should, too!”

 

Elyas turned around to see Sam staring up into the space above his head, trying in vain to blink away the tears welling in her eyes. She brought a hand to her face and wiped them away, all while everyone within earshot of the brief exchange glared daggers at Elyas and booed him like a theatrical villain. Apparently men nearly getting raped was welcome comedy, but a man making a woman cry was a crime deserving of all sorts of spiteful jeers.

 

“Ok, I'm sorry!” Elyas got up to calm Sam down, but she turned away from him. It was the first time he had seen her cry, as man  _ or  _ woman. He hadn't stopped to consider the possibility that the changes Sam underwent ran deeper than her swelling chest and curving hips. It would certainly explain her womanly outburst.

 

“We’ll get one room, alright? That's a good idea. It'll be cheaper, too.”

 

Sam drew in a wet sniff and ran her fingers across her cheeks. When she turned back to him, all of the negative emotion had been pushed down somewhere deep, and he was met with a pair of bright green eyes and a faint smile of quiet confidence. Her freckled face was too pretty to look away from, but too alike that of his long-time rival to not feel some remaining consternation.

 

To make matters worse, it was getting more and more difficult to separate an old anger from his new fascination with this spritely young woman. In the past, when his eyes met with Samuel and the boy smiled, Elyas’ heart would pound and his palms would grow sweaty. His gaze meeting Sam's was no different in its effect, though the reason for his reaction was quite different.

 

He hated it.

 

“What does a man do when he meets a woman at a tavern?” said Sam.

 

Elyas gave her a confused, open-mouthed look that turned tight-lipped as her lips curled into a wider smile.

 

“He buys her a drink,” she said.


	7. A Drink Too Many

It didn't take long for Sam to guilt Elyas to buy her  _ just one  _ drink. It took even less effort for her to convince him to get one for himself. A few minutes after that, one drink became two, and Elyas found his worries fading away amidst a pleasantly drunken buzz.

 

“How can you drink that so fast?” asked Sam. “This ale tastes like watered-down piss.”

 

“You're the one who insisted. And there are worse things to drink - like piss that  _ hasn't  _ been watered down.”

 

Sam laughed. Her pale face was flushed red from the smothering heat of the place, and the cheap drink. “I would hope you don't know what either one tastes like.”

 

Unfortunately he did, and he didn't trust himself to meet Sam's eyes without somehow giving away that fact. So instead he turned on his stool to the inn at large, taking in the fire-lit party that he had managed to become a part of, despite early difficulties. The other patrons were no longer paying him or Sam much attention, except for quite a few drunken leers from passing men aimed at his companion. Elyas didn't like that one bit - nor did he like to think about  _ why  _ it bothered him so much.

 

"Why the long face?" said Sam. She leaned forward, putting her hand on his thigh for support. Elyas tipped his third mug of ale back in the hopes that he would become numb to the awkward tension that only seemed to afflict him. Despite only having drank a fraction of what he had, she was getting more handsy by the second.

 

“I’m just…” He glanced down at her hand, vision swimming, and took dim notice of the slender fingers drumming across his thigh. “...Thinking.”

 

Her manic smile flipped into a frown with such speed that he knew whatever displeasure to come would be an act. "You'd better not be thinking about anyone back home. We're on an adventure, after all. Just you and I!"

 

The faces of his family members passed through his mind's eye, followed by Azug, who stuck there like a bad stain. Elyas had never been one to get overly dour or sentimental when he drank, but he'd never before gotten drunk right after ending a relationship.

 

Nor, for that matter, had he ever ended a relationship before.

 

"I think I broke up with Azug," he said blankly into his nearly-empty drink. He set it down on the counter, and within moments the barkeep had filled it back to overflowing. Coin went much further here than it did in the city's center. He had given the man a single ducat, which was apparently enough to keep an endless supply of alcohol flowing into his and Sam's mugs. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that he was still overpaying, though.

 

After a long moment of silence from Sam, which seemed to overpower even the roar of the tavern, she spoke.

 

"Good. Now you can go about finding a real woman."

 

Elyas scowled into his drink. "God knows when that will happen."

 

A second hand joined the first on his leg, and he looked towards Sam just in time to see her face moving towards him - but too late to avoid her lips pressing into his. He slid off of the stool, knocking it over and sputtering wordlessly as he dropped his mug to the floor, soaking his own boots. Sam's face was so red he thought she might explode, and her face was frozen into an anxious, manic grin.

 

"What was that?" he finally managed to exclaim.

 

Sam turned her gaze downward, and her smile wavered. "Now you can say you've been kissed by a woman."

 

There were no words to adequately express the confusion seizing him in that moment. He would have had a tough time processing the kiss even if he were sober, and he had long since left clear-headedness behind. Sam's eyes flickered up to him every few moments, as if waiting for some reaction beyond open-mouthed shock.

 

But what could she expect besides that? Disgust? Excitement? Arousal? Betrayal? All perfectly valid responses, and each getting their turn within his addled mind.

 

"That's  _ not  _ funny," he snarled. Her smile dropped into open-mouthed horror, and her gaze followed him as he stormed past her, making his way to the barkeep, who was engaged with another group of customers a few dozen feet away.

 

Before he could reach the man, Sam scrambled from her stool and grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to stop. He spun around prepared to shout her down, but a few warning looks from the men at nearby tables kept his anger tempered. The last thing he needed was for some ruffians-turned-white knights to turn his and Sam's argument physical. Like she herself had said, everyone else saw her as a woman.

 

"This time, I really  _ am  _ getting a room and going to bed."

 

"I'm sorry, alright? Let me make it up to you. I'll do anything you want." She slid her hand down his arm and took hold of his wrist. "We can talk about it upstairs… just you and I."

 

More talking. That was always the battleground he seemed to come out the loser from when he and Sam entered. That, and love. What sort of world was this, where the dates gave her every women she ever wanted, while denying him even a single victory? For years he'd played the good sport in this losing game, but no more. Tonight, he would get what he wanted.

 

"I already know what I want from you." Elyas forcibly removed her hand from his while glowering down at her. "And it's something I  _ know  _ you can help me with."

 

Sam's green eyes flashed with interest, and she drew her shoulders into a guarded posture even as she took a step closer to him. Her breathing quickened, causing the slender fists held to her chest to rise and fall with the pace of it.

 

"Let's go upstairs," she said in a dry and shaky voice.

 

"No. There's nothing to talk about. I want to fuck a woman, and you're going to help me."

 

All of the blood left Sam's face with such rapidity that it was a miracle she remained standing, though she did wobble a bit before catching the nearby countertop for support.

 

"Now?" she murmured in a voice that was barely audible over the din of laughter and creaking furniture. "I can't do that. I'm not ready, I…"

 

"Why  _ not _ now?" Elyas burst out before sweeping his hand across the packed inn. "We're surrounded by drunk women with loose morals, aren't we? You asked what I want, and what I want is to fuck one of them."

 

There were people of all species, shapes, and colors. Few of the patrons were women, and even fewer were  _ attractive  _ women, but working against those odds would be as much Sam's problem as his own.

 

"You… you can't do that!" she replied, fixing him with a decidedly disapproving glare of her own.

 

"And why not? You were the one going on about how we can do whatever we want now that we're away from our parents."

 

Sam opened her mouth to let loose some quick-minded retort, but for once, Elyas was the faster of the two.

 

"And weren't you  _ also  _ saying that I should find a real woman to love? I plan to do just that, even if the love only lasts one night."

 

She said nothing. For once, he'd won. An unpleasant scowl spread across her face, matched in magnitude by the self-satisfied smile that lit up his own expression. But what seemed like a triumphant moment quickly became frightening, as Sam's unhappiness descended into a barely-contained rage that had her shoulders shaking and face contorting into a hideous mask of anger.

 

"What?" said Elyas, becoming angry himself at her bizarre reaction. "Am I wrong?"

 

"No," she snapped. "You're disgusting."

 

And with that, she grabbed her nearly-full mug of ale from the countertop and flung it at him, showering him in reeking alcohol. Some got on the men seated behind him, and they leapt from their stools ready to deliver a beat down to the culprit. Then, they got a good look at the drenched Elyas and his infuriated companion, and burst into good-natured laughter.

 

Sam stormed off into the crowded center of the tavern, quickly disappearing into the teeming masses. Her hurried departure left Elyas feeling very much alone, despite the calloused hands clapping him on the back. Alone, wet, and feeling shockingly sober.

  
  


 

* * *

 

  
  


The door to the women's bathroom flew open, and Sam stormed into the small room of stalls, shoulder-checking another woman who was about to make her way out. Red flooded her vision, and she nearly throttled the clumsy idiot before instead turning her rage to one of the stalls. She grabbed the door and slammed it shut over and over, splintering wood and snapping off the top most of the old rusted hinges.

 

"Holy fuck!" slurred the other woman. "You got a fuckin' problem with the furnishings, your highness?"

 

Sam whirled around to face the bathroom's sole other occupant. She was quite a bit older than Elyas, with the crow's feet to show for it, but everything from the neck down was cowtits and an absurdly comical hourglass figure. Not elegant in the slightest, but the sort of cheaply sexual appeal that might grab Elyas' attention in his current state.

 

"No, I have a problem with men who hide their venereal status! I was almost duped by a man with crotch-rot. He's the one by the bar who just had a mug of ale dumped on his diseased head."

 

She said that with quite a bit more force than she'd meant to, but the eye-widening shock the bar whore met her with told Sam that she'd bought into her very real - though misattributed - anger. The woman left the bathroom, and Sam ducked into a stall with a working door before unbuttoning her pants and slipping a hand into her underwear.

 

Hours of bumpy riding across uneven cobblestone had upset her tuck job, leaving her with a bulge that was no longer remotely mistakable as a prominent vulva. It was no small miracle that Elyas hadn't noticed. She thanked his obliviousness for that, along with the endless supply of dirt-cheap alcohol she'd pushed his way.

 

"Fuck."

 

Sam gritted her teeth and gave her bundled package a squeeze, grimacing at the dull ache that radiated outward from the unwanted organs. She hated how the pain reminded her so viscerally of their presence, but couldn't help but revel in the way she mistreated them. If she wanted them gone -  _ really  _ wanted them gone - she could make it so, magical pair of rings be damned.

 

"Fuck!"

 

She released her throbbing cock and balls and tucked them back between her legs, nestling the head of her dick in between her buttocks. Sweat had left the space slick, and the sensation of her own plans sliding against her puckered anus called to mind all of those things she had dreamt of doing with another's. With a shuddering sigh, Sam leaned her forearm against the stall wall and slid her other hand further back between her thighs, allowing her to rub her cock back and forth against her entrance.

 

There were still ways to salvage the disastrous night. What if she simply  _ told  _ Elyas that she would solve his problem herself. The problem there was that after their last conversation, he was likely to look at any such offer with suspicious eyes. Assuming he were to say yes, that opened up a whole new world of difficulties. Would he be alright with the…  _ state  _ of her genitals? He would, wouldn't he? She was no different from Azug in that respect.

 

Sam nearly retched at the mental image of that unwashed beast grinding itself into Elyas. Would he expect Sam to use her cock the same way? The thought sent a sickening shiver through her - not at all like the heart-pounding warmth that seized her stomach when she imagined Elyas grabbing her hair and pistoning his own cock in and out of her reddened ass.

 

"Oh, fuck…"

 

Sam withdrew a shaky hand from between her legs. Precum had begun to leak from the head of her cock, making her hole even slicker than before. If Elyas were to barge in here right now, she wouldn't do a thing to stop him. She'd long since pictured their first time as taking place in the bedroom of their own shared manor, joined under the covers in the silver light of the stars. Now, the piss-coated bathroom of a flophouse seemed an equally exciting prospect. Far less romantic, but somehow even more arousing.

 

Drawing in a deep, steadying breath, Sam buttoned her pants and left the stall, stopping just short of the door to the tavern's main room. She would go out there, find Elyas, and touch him like only a woman touches a man.

 


	8. What Might Have Been

Sam emerged from the restroom to find the tavern in an uproar. She had thought that the place had already climbed the peaks of debauchery, but just a few short minutes in the restroom had seen it turn from a smoke-filled den of seedy men and diseased women into a roaring party. Men laughed and women shrieked in drunken thrill, dancing together with drinks in hand and spilling drinks on one another. As she forced her way through the tangled thicket of bodies in search of Elyas, she spotted a pot-bellied naked goblin standing atop a table, swinging his absurdly-sized member in pendulous circles. A fat old maid barged past Sam and landed on the side of the table, then opened her mouth wide as she did her best to catch the head of his cock between her lips, to the great amusement of all within view.

 

There seemed to be no end to the writing mass of sweaty bodies jostling against each in an attempt to reach whichever man or woman had caught their eye. The sight of so many shameless, gibbering retards grinding against each other made bile rise up into her throat. Why did these disgusting simpletons get to take such pride in their filthy, lumpy forms, while she felt like taking a knife to her flesh every time she reached between her legs?

 

A hand squeezed Sam's ass. She didn't bother to see whom it belonged to before sliding her stiletto from its sheath and slashing at it in a quick, clean arc. A shout of pain came from behind her, and she turned to see a shirtless Elyas seated at a table full of the same laborers they had encountered when they first entered the inn. He clutched his bleeding hand in between his thighs, grimacing as he tried to stop the bleeding.

 

"What the hell?" he shouted above the din.

 

Sam stared at him, flabbergasted, and hurriedly tucked her small knife away before he noticed her standing beside him.

 

"Was that you?" he exclaimed.

 

She did her best to portray shock and ignorance. The first of the two came naturally, and the latter she was well-practiced in faking.

 

"Was what me? Are you  _ bleeding?" _

 

"Yes, I'm bleeding! Someone just cut my fucking hand!"

 

His words came out slow and slurred, telling her that he'd gone a few drinks deeper since she entered the bathroom. That was good - he couldn't fuck any bar whores if his cock didn't work. 

 

Sam had never drunk enough to induce impotence, but she'd feigned as much more than a few times, when the thought of coupling with a woman was too horrid to bear.

 

Just how many girls had Sam bedded as a man, all to keep Elyas pure? Only for him to fall onto the cock of a creature more distasteful than every one of those soft, perfume-reeking sluts. She wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

 

A bearded man seated across from Elyas gestured at the latter's poor attempt to stem the flow of blood from his palm.

 

"That's not going to work! Wrap it up tight with a cloth. Learned that in the war, I did. Just don't do it on a neck wound. Learned that one the 'ard way."

 

The others at the table pounded the table in overwrought laughter, while the bearded man gave them a sheepish grin that seemed to indicate he wasn't joking.

 

"Cloth…" Elyas rolled his head from side to side, dull eyes drifting lazily across the table and floor around him. "Shirts are cloth. I was wearing one, I think."

 

His gaze fell on the ale-soaked shirt he had bundled up beside his stool, and he scooped it up from the floor with a grunting lurch. A pouch attached to a strap fell from the garment, and landed on the floor with the jingle of coins. Even over the deafening noise of the tavern, that telltale sound turned quite a few heads, but Sam snatched it up and stuffed it into her shirt before anyone was the wiser. Elyas was lucky that she was there, and still sober. She would be sure to let him know as much in the morning.

 

"Come upstairs with me," she shouted into his ear. "I want to tell you something."

 

Elyas shook his head as he wrapped his hand with the shirt. "I don't want to hear it."

 

All eyes were on her now. Not only was she a striking beauty - especially in a place where the wealthiest women were the whores - but the others at the table were likely hoping for a repeat of the earlier entertainment she'd provided when she'd doused Elyas in cheap alcohol. Her hand went to Elyas' shoulder, and she so desperately wanted to slide it down his naked chest and abdomen, as she had planned. But the expectant stares of all those scruffy men had her feeling too meek to do more than lean on him as she put her lips next to his ear.

 

"I have a secret to tell you. It's a good one."

 

That line had sounded so silky-smooth in her head, but she stumbled over each syllable as she stammered it into his ear. In his drunken stupor he gave no indication that he'd heard her, though his gaze did eventually wander back over to her.

 

"Why are you still here? Did you see me enjoying myself, and decide that something had to be done?"

 

There was nothing snappy about his tone, which was calm, though sad and wavering. That worried her more than any anger he might have shown.

 

"I want you to enjoy yourself," said Sam. The words came out as a pitiful squeak without an ounce of real meaning behind them. It was all she could think to say.

 

"No, you want to build me up, and then tear me down." Elyas threw his hands up in the air before smacking them back down on the table in exaggerated fashion. Whatever pain afflicted his hand was clearly dulled by the liquor. "Because… you think it's funny, or good sport. I don't really know, and I don't care."

 

The mood around the table took a turn for the awkward, the laughter becoming strained and less jovial as curious eyes lingered on the two companions. It was clear to all that their conversation was a serious one, even if few were close enough to overhear it.

 

"I’m headed home in the morning,” sighed Elyas. “You can take the room. I might just… sleep right here.” He waved a lazy hand through the air before dropping it and letting it dangle at his side. “Oh, and the wagon. I’m sure you’d find a way to take that from me, too. I’d rather just give it to you.”

 

That was when it hit Sam like a charging bull. It didn't matter what she did, or said. She could grab his cock and scream into his face that she wanted him to fuck her, and his mind would immediately search out the greater plot behind the act. Her body was close to what it should have always been, but she had little hope of Elyas ever seeing her as something other than a threat. Years of teasing and pranks had seen to that.

 

She leaned in to utter one last desperate plea into his ear, but a commotion to her right led to a few brawny bodies crashing into the table between her and Elyas. When they moved aside a few seconds later and she rushed to rejoin him, she saw that his attention was occupied by something on his other side. The tavern wench Sam had run into in the restroom was speaking to him, leaned over so far that her freckled tits nearly spilled from her bodice and onto his face. She smiled, whispered something into his ear, then reached into his lap and made some unseen motion that caused Elyas to flinch. Another whisper from the woman, and he pushed up from his stool and staggered behind the woman into the crowd.

 

“Wait!” Sam shouted, trying to give chase. Her pursuit was cut short by a shifting mass of tavern goers whose interference seemed almost purposefully designed to separate the three of them. She looked left and right, up and down, shouting Elyas’ name over and over, but he was gone. Shock turned to panic, and she raced all over the tavern, looking in vain for any sign of the vanished pair, but found nothing but group after group of delirious drunks who took no notice of the hyperventilating young woman pushing her way past them.

 

She came to the bottom of the stairwell that lead up to the inn’s bedrooms, and stopped. Did she really want to go banging on every door in the place? More to the point, did she  _ really  _ want to find them, and bear witness to what was undoubtedly taking place behind one of those many doors?

 

With heavy legs and a heavier heart, Sam turned away from the looming stairway and began walking towards the tavern’s exit, slowly at first, then faster and faster until she was racing towards it as quickly as new pathways opened up in the throngs of people. By the time she shot out onto the street, she was panting harder than ever. Tears streamed from her eyes, sweat dripped down her forehead, and she moaned in agony at the moonlit sky. Her running had nearly made Elyas’ coinpurse bounce out of her shirt, and she clutched it loosely in one hand as she walked aimlessly towards a sidestreet that ran beside the tavern.

 

Around the bend and a few hundred feet ahead, the still waters of the city’s harbor glittered under the scintillating glow of the moon. Sam let out an aggrieved snarl and rushed towards it, fully intent on hurling the coin purse in and watching the last remnants of their ill-fated adventure sink to the bottom of the bay.

 

A shadowy mass rolled in from the harborside street ahead, gradually separating into five distinct human figures that laughed as they staggered their way towards her. Even from that fair distance, she could smell their drunkenness. Caught between running past them, running  _ from  _ them, and simply hiding behind one of the smashed crates littering the alleyway, Sam remained frozen where she stood until one of the inebriated men drew close enough to notice her - and the small bag she held tight to her chest. His eyes glittered yellow in the light of the lonely street lamp behind him, and he held his arms out wide to indicate to his comrades to stop.

 

“What’s that you got there, little missy?”

  
  


 

* * *

  
  


 

At first, Elyas thought that it was Sam dragging him by the wrist through the tavern’s packed crowds. But once he and the woman tugging him along crashed through the door to the women’s restroom, and her hand began working at the drawstring of his trousers, he remembered the stranger whispering into his ear. He remembered seeing that face, so tired and worn behind the strained smile and layers of makeup. He remembered his eyes drifting down, and seeing those massive tits and tight body swaying seductively in front of him.

 

And as he looked up from the hand slipping into his trousers, he saw those same brown eyes staring into his. The barmaid was like a little piece of the tavern given life. A little run down, more than a tad dirty, but undeniably alluring in her erotic energy. The moment hardly felt real, and he might have let it last forever, had the door to his rear not opened and revealed two women who looked quite displeased to have found a man receiving a handjob in their place of privacy. Elyas grabbed the barmaid by the shoulders and shoved her back into one of the stalls, which swung shut behind them. Somewhere within the space of those ten paces, her calloused yet expert hands managed to get his cock free of his breeches.

 

“I don’t know your name,” Elyas gasped before swallowing down his excitement. It was actually happening. God don’t let him be dreaming, he was about to fuck a woman. “I’m-”

 

She put a finger on his lips to silence him.

 

“Names don’t matter.”

 

Her other hand continued to work at his cock, and Elyas prayed to any greater being that would listen to please,  _ please  _ let the strength of his member overcome the alcohol coursing through his bloodstream. He’d earlier resigned himself to ending the night in bed alone, and hadn’t considered the possibility of whisky dick being an issue. It had happened before, once, with Azug. Her admittedly clumsy attempt to give him a conciliatory post-fuck blowjob had ended in failure, and she’d roundly mocked him to the point of near-tears.

 

“Your friend told me you’ve got a problem,” said the woman.

 

Elyas stiffened.

 

“Sam?”

 

The woman smiled. “Got the same issue, I do. Makes finding a good fuck rough.”

 

Relief washed over Elyas as his excitement doubled and cock stiffened. Not only did this woman not care that he’d never stuck his cock in a pussy, but she herself had never been fucked? It seemed impossible, given her age and the nature of her work, but he was far too horny to care if she was lying. He wanted to fuck her - he  _ needed  _ to fuck her - and most of all, he needed to thank Sam.

 

Head swimming and vision wavering, Elyas squinted downward to see that his erection had reached full mast. He grabbed the woman by one arm and turned her towards the toilet, then gave her a shove towards the toilet. With a grunt she landed on the back of it with her forearms, where she remained as she peered back with expectant lust. He hadn’t actually meant to shove her that hard - that was simply the minimum force it took for Azug to even notice him - but she clearly enjoyed the roughness.

 

Elyas sauntered in between her spread legs and hiked up her dress while he fumbled with his cock in an attempt to find her entrance. Those few moments without her hand rubbing his dick had reduced him to half-hardness, but the feeling of her juice-soaked flesh against the head of his cock had his erection raging back to life. Holding his dick by the base, he dragged it from one buttock to the other until he found a hole, then pressed forward. It was impossibly tight, even with the wetness coating both their bodies, and the way the barmaid recoiled against the toilet told him he’d made a mistake.

 

“That’s my fuckin’ arsehole!” snapped the woman.

 

Elyas muttered an apology and let her reset her position on the toilet, then gave finding his target another try. Going slower this time, he worked his way carefully downward from her puckered anus, through the hairy nest of her pubes, to an wetness-soaked cleft that seemed to invite him forward with its soft warmth. Her folds teased at the head of his cock, bidding him to push forward and mark his entrance into manhood. It was a more welcoming sensation than he had ever imagined possible. And the sound that stopped him short was no less jarring than the warmth gripping his cock was inviting.

 

“Elyas!” came a cry so distant that it seemed to emanate from within the recesses of his own mind. He might have ignored it and sunk his member into the woman beneath him, had the cry not come a second and a third time, each instance more desperate than the last.

 

“Elyas, help!”

 

Recognition hit him like an ocean wave, carrying him out of the restroom before his conscious mind had time to register what had happened. It was more reaction than decision, and it took him halfway to the inn’s exit to realize that his unfastened pants were in danger of falling off of his half-exposed ass. He hiked them up and slammed through the door with his shoulder, stumbling out onto a poorly-lit street occupied by a few lonely souls drifting their way towards whatever destinations people had in mind at that ungodly hour.

 

“Help!”

 

He spun about. The shout sounded as if it had come from the tavern, but it was far louder and clearer than the dull roar of voices within, and certainly clearer than it had been in the restroom he’d just left behind. He ran to one side of the tavern, slipping on wet cobblestone and smashing the back of his head on the ground. His ears rang and head throbbed, and for a moment of gut-sinking dread he was certain he was about to lose his grip of consciousness altogether.

 

The pleading cry came again, and the fading light of the street lamp above him regained its brightness. Nausea worked its way from his head to his stomach, and he rolled over onto all fours as a surge of acrid bile spewed from his mouth. He was back on his feet the moment the twisting of his guts abated enough to allow him movement, staggering towards the other tavern-side alley. The night was no longer fun, and the bitterness he’d felt towards Sam had left with the last of her desperate cries.

 

A shadowy mass of figures writhed in the dim light of the alley. As Elyas sprinted towards him, maintaining a precarious control of his body that seemed in danger of vanishing at any moment, they dissipated into six distinct forms. He couldn’t be sure which was Sam, until one final cry of his own name made it clear. Without missing a bit he charged headlong into the man holding her by the arms, tackling him to the ground where he unleashed a furious storm of blows that met as much dirt as it did flesh. A hand grabbed his shoulder and he whirled to his feet, shoving the next man into a wall where he smashed his head against rough brick. Something hit him in the back of the head and he slumped slightly, mercifully allowing the next blow to connect with the man he held against the wall.

 

Elyas turned and grabbed the man to his rear by the scruff of his shirt, headbutted him in the nose, then kneed him in the balls. He fought like Azug had taught him, doing so much damage in so little time that his opponents had little time to consider just how seriously Elyas was outnumbered, should they wisen up and engage him all at once. A fist connected with his jawline, sending him to the ground where he lay looking up at the stars directly overhead.

 

For one terrifying moment, he expected that silvery glow to be replaced by the shadows of innumerable boots stomping on his exposed head. But moments passed, the mens’ urgent shouts grew distant, and within the span of a blink he was met by Sam’s wide-eyed stare looming over his. She took hold of his hand to help him sit up, where he saw three of the men helping the other two limp out of the far end of the alley before disappearing from sight.

 

The two companions stared at each other in open-mouthed silence for a time, blood dripping from Elyas’ rain-matted scalp as Sam kneeled in front of him. His elbow burned down to the bone, his vision swam to the point where seeing quadruplets would have been preferable, his head ached, and his gut churned in excruciating sickness. Yet all of that seemed inconsequential when he took notice of Sam’s blouse, which had been torn open at the top few buttons, revealing one of her small, naked breasts.

 

Raw anger overtook his own suffering, and he shot to his feet before quickly collapsing back down to his buttocks. The pain may have been dulled by his fury, but that wasn’t helping his coordination any. A few blows to the head - one of them self-inflicted - had left him even worse off than his drinking. Sam squatted down beside him to steady his wavering body, and he looked up at her in concern.

 

“Are you alright?” he gasped.

 

She bit her trembling lip, then cried out in wordless emotion and flung her arms around him, nearly pressing him to the ground. What followed was an outpour of near-incoherent thanks and sorries, mixed with a stream of tears that Elyas found himself mirroring. The night had taken him through a gauntlet of emotions, leaving him simply tired. After the both of them found that they’d said every apology that needed to be said, they once again fell silent. Sam helped Elyas to his feet, and felt about his body before touching the back of his head and coming back with fingers coated in blood.

 

“You’re hurt!”

 

Elyas patted his head just as she had, and felt the same sticky wetness. It was drying quickly, and he felt no fresh trickle of blood. That had almost certainly been from his drunken slip on the cobblestone - but better to not mention that unnecessary bit of information.

 

“I’m fine, I’m just…” He looked back towards the bend in the alley that would take them to the inn’s entrance. “We have to tell someone. The constables can find out who those men were.”

 

Sam threw her arms around his naked torso and pressed her face to his chest.

 

“Please, I just want to get out of here! I don’t want anyone to know what almost happened to me.”

 

Elyas stared down at her tousled red hair in disbelief.

 

“Men like that can’t be running around! They need to pay!”

 

She turned her face up to his, an anguished mask of pleading in the center of which were set two captivating green eyes. He’d never wanted to hold her so tight in his life. Then again, had he  _ ever  _ wanted to hold her at all?

 

“They  _ did  _ pay,” she replied. “You made them pay. Please, I just want to leave!”

 

“Ok, ok.”

 

He placed a comforting hand on the small of her back and slipped the other between them for his coin purse. Early that night, he had transferred a handful of his ducats to his pants pocket for use in the tavern. That way, no one would take notice of his greater stash, and once his pocket coins ran out buying drinks, he could feign poverty without the raucous tavern goers pushing him to spend more.

 

A cunning move, he’d thought. Cunning indeed, if he’d stayed sober enough to keep his shirt on and take notice of some clever bandit snatching the purse from around his very body.

 

“What’s wrong,” said Sam.

 

“The money! I had the purse on a strap, but I took my shirt off, and-”

 

“You lost it?” she exclaimed, taking a step back to look him over and confirm that the tavern goers had indeed taken the literal and metaphorical shirt off his back.

 

Elyas ran back to the tavern, and with a great deal of convincing managed to convince Sam to accompany him inside. Everyone he spoke to either claimed to have no idea what he was talking about, or acted as if they had never met them at all. While he darted about from group to group, Sam grew more agitated and worried to the point of tears, and he was ultimately forced to abandon his search before she had a complete breakdown from what had been done to her.

 

“We have to go back,” said Elyas as they stepped back out onto the street. “We can’t very well keep going, not with no money. God, I fucked it all up, didn’t I? I really fucked up.”

 

Sam slapped him across the face. He reeled from the blow - more from surprise than actual pain - and held his own to his face as he stared at her in surprise. Her trembling lips curled in displeasure, and her eyes narrowed intensely even as they continued their endless watering.

 

“I’m not turning back. Not now, and not ever!” Her voice cracked in sorrow, and she thrust a finger into his face with such speed that he jerked his head backwards instinctively. “I’ll fix myself, with or without you. But if something happens to me, it will be  _ your  _ fault, because you weren’t there to help me! You said you’d help me, and now you say you want to leave, and that I’ll have to do this alone…”

 

The more her anguished voice broke down and softened in volume, the lower his shoulders shrunk, until he felt as if the weight of his shame might crush him to the ground completely. Then there was silence, except for the muffled sound of the tavern nearby, and darkness, except for the light of her green eyes burning a hole in his.

 

“Alright.” He shrugged and slapped his hands to the sides of his thighs. “I’ll keep going.”

  
  


 

* * *

  
  


Two hours of travelling by wagon took them well outside of the city's outskirts. The moon travelled from the edge of the horizon to the sky's apex, just as the yellow street lamps of the suburbs disappeared behind foggy moors and thick forests. The cobbled road became rougher and sparser until it gave away to gravel, then dirt. Wind rustled tree branches instead of rooftop weather vanes, and owls called out to each other instead of drunks. It had always been cold, but the passage of time and the intensity of events had sobered up Elyas enough that he began to take true notice of the shivers wracking his body. Supplementing that was the nausea working its way from his gut to his throat. It'd started when that Orc had assaulted him, and drinking pint after pint of cheap alcohol hadn't helped matters - surprisingly, neither had sobering up a bit.

 

Sam shared his chills if not his nausea, and huddled against his side with a quilted blanket wrapped around her thin body. He had suggested that she take shelter against the wind in the back, but she had refused in steadfast silence by nestling her head against his side. Only a few hours ago, their present arrangement would have made him so self-aware as to be completely incapable of thinking of anything but his own unease. Now, he felt more comfortable than he had with anyone before.

 

Well, almost anyone.

 

When he was with Azug, he was comfortable because she was in total control. He didn't have to think, and all he had to do was what she said to. All he had to feel was what she  _ made  _ him feel. It was nice, for a time, but it always brought a certain shame in the aftermath. Were men not meant to think, and do, and lead?

 

This felt natural. This felt  _ right.  _ He imagined throngs of people standing on the roadside, watching this young woman huddled against him, and felt nothing but pride. Every man wondered what they would do when faced with a situation like his. There was relief in the fact that he had not disappointed his own boyhood daydreams.

 

"I need to stop," mumbled Elyas. The words came out as a slurred stammering, but not because of the drink he'd enjoyed. "I'm too tired. If we don't stop now, I'll fall asleep where I'm sitting."

 

Sam squeezed his arms and dug her head further into his side. "Are we alone? I don't want to see anyone else. Not after what happened."

 

There was nothing behind them but the same Misty darkness and weed-rooted trail that he had watched pass in front of them for hours.

 

"We've been alone for miles."

 

Sam gave a sleepy moan of acknowledgement and released her grip on Elyas, allowing him to slide off of the bench and drop down to the ground. He strangely enjoyed helping Sam down - the feel of her delicate hands, guided by his. Her dainty weight, which he eased to the ground with great care. It was like having a younger cousin to take care of - or perhaps a sister.

 

But he had a sister, and he had never felt like this.

 

"The tents," said Elyas. "We need a light. It's too dark out, and I've never set up-"

 

With the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, Sam grabbed Elyas' hand and dragged him towards the rear of the wagon.

 

"Come. We'll sleep in here."

 

Any flat surface would have been a suitable substitute for a bed in his current state. A flattened patch of grass beside the road was his first instinct, but he did prefer Sam's choice. She clambered through the back flap of the wagon, and he followed. The interior consisted of a narrow floor space with two benches running down either side, with canopied walls and ceiling. The benches were all taken up by the supplies that Elyas has packed, as was much of the floor between them and the wagon's front. The only room available to them was a narrow one, just large enough for two people to lay side by side.

 

While Elyas mulled over the logistics of their sleeping arrangements, Sam got to work pulling down enough blankets and pillows to turn a wooden floor into a padded surface fit for restful sleep. She then fell atop the makeshift bed, and motioned for Elyas to join her. The softness beneath him finally allowed his tense muscles a much-needed reprieve, and he let out a long sigh of exhaustion as the back of his head sunk into a pillow. He couldn't see how Sam had positioned herself next to him, and was far too tired to turn his head and look. His sickness had abated somewhat with lack of movement, and he wasn't about to upset whatever delicate balance he had found. Another few moments spent looking at the back of his eyelids and he would have fallen asleep, had she not spoken up.

 

"Are you awake?" Her fingers brushed the edge of his shoulder. "There's something I have to tell you."

 

Elyas groaned, which quickly turned into a yawn. She could thank him all she wanted in the morning. For now, all he wanted was to let his mind slip into nothingness.

 

"I'm glad you're here," said Sam, taking his yawn as an answer in itself. "I can't do this without you. You know that, right?"

 

He nodded and mumbled an acknowledgement. It was nice to be needed, even if he still didn't feel particularly wanted.

 

"And…" Sam drew in a deep breath before continuing. "I'm sorry if I hurt you. I've always thought of you as a… friend, even if the feeling wasn't mutual."

 

This wasn't a topic Elyas wanted to broach again, especially given how tolerable he was currently finding Sam's presence. What was the point of reopening old wounds? A few hours ago, he'd been dead-set on cutting her out of his life completely. Did she want to risk that again? Why couldn't she let the matter drop? 

 

Elyas said nothing, and the wood of the wagon floor creaked as she rolled onto her side and jostled his shoulder. An aching throb shook his skull and made his vision swim.

 

"Did you fall asleep? I said I was sorry."

 

He pursed his lips and let out a huff of annoyance.

 

"And yet you managed to do it again," said Elyas. "I was  _ this  _ close to fucking a woman when I heard your shouting."

 

A moment of silence passed between them, and then another wooden groan as Sam sat upright. Only when Elyas opened his eyes and saw her shadowy form hunched beside his feet did he realize that what he'd intended as a half-jest wasn't actually all that funny.

 

"Which is fine! There are always more women, right?" Elyas shot up into a seated position alongside her, squinting into the darkness to try and get an idea of what expression Sam wore.

 

"You shouldn't do that," she said darkly.

 

"Do what?"

 

"Fuck someone who isn't right for you. It's disgusting. I want to vomit when I imagine you touching that diseased whore… or that  _ animal  _ you sullied yourself with."

 

Elyas should have been offended beyond belief with how callously she laid into his nearly-nonexistent love life, but the sheer spiteful venom in her voice had him so taken aback that he simply gawked at her in weary disbelief. How could someone be so invested in his own dalliances, even if they were rather…  _ unorthodox? _

 

"She's not an  _ animal,  _ and she wasn't wrong for me. Things didn't work out between us because we both wanted different things. That's all."

 

He was about to lay back down and let that be the end of it, when Sam spun around on her buttocks to face him and rocked forward into a kneeling position.

 

"What did you want?"

 

Elyas narrowed his gaze at her in an attempt to discern any evidence of mockery or trickery, but could see little and sensed none of that usual playfulness in her tone of voice. She seemed genuinely curious, if a little disgusted.

 

It took a great deal of willpower to muster the courage to answer, and when he did, it was with the smallest voice imaginable.

 

"I wanted to be a man… at least some of the time."

 

How pathetic that must have sounded. Yet instead of withdrawing in disgust, Sam slid towards him. He could see the pale flesh of her throat move as she swallowed.

 

"How?" she asked.

 

Elyas frowned and looked downward in shame. "What do you mean, 'how'? What does a man always do with a woman?"

 

"He protects her."

 

Her hand fell lightly on his head, and she ran her slender fingers through his hair, squeezing and loosening them in alternating fashion. The feel of her nails taking across his scalp was electrifying, a paralyzing contact that had his back going rigid and breath catching in his throat.

 

"What are you doing?" he said softly.

 

She paused her stroking, but only for a second.

 

"I want to thank you… and show you that I'm sorry."

 

"It's fine," he murmured. "I know you are."

 

This time, she didn't miss a beat.

 

"I'm sorry you never got to touch a woman. You could touch me, if you want."

 

He looked up at her. "That's not funn-"

 

A pair of soft lips pressed against his, cutting his words short. Two hands followed, grasping his cheeks and stroking up and down as his frozen muscles thawed under her caress. He melted into her, the reality of who he was kissing ignored in favor of the incredible passion conveyed in her embrace. Elyas had known what it was like to be wanted - Azug's demanding sexuality had taught him that. Then, Sam had needed him - first his resources, then his aid, then himself. Both need and want had been nice for a time, but neither compared to the combination of the two he now felt.

 

The strands of hair tickling his forehead withdrew along with Sam's lips. A thin strand of saliva hung suspended between him and her for a few inches of movement, then broke. Her shadowed face loomed before his, her lips opening and closing in gentle motions as their breaths mingled in the space they shared. In a move that surprised even himself, Elyas thrust out his hand and grabbed her breast through her shirt. He was touching as much ribcage as he was breast, but had managed to cup most of the latter in the palm of his hand. This was where she would screech in shock and he would call her bluff, he told himself.

 

But nothing of the sort happened. Sam's breathing quickened, and she placed her hand over his own before squeezing her own breast with their joined palms. Then she tipped forward on her knees, resting her forehead in the crook of his neck and cradling the back of his head with her free hand.

 

"You can do anything you want. I won't stop you," she whispered into his ear. "No one else is here. It's only us."

 

Despite her goading him on, Sam was the only one making any attempt to move things forward. She lifted her head up and scooted her knees on either side of his lap, even as Elyas remained frozen in a stupor of indecision. The feel of her breast, the scent of her hair, the sound of her breath - every sense told him that he should fling her onto the pillows and climb atop her that very second. But his mind - and the memory of just  _ who  _ this person used to be - made him hesitate, and had his nausea come surging back so strongly that he could taste bile over the memory of Sam's lips.

 

"Wait, wait..." Elyas squeezed Sam's arms and tried to draw away from her gyrating hips, but couldn't put enough space between them to stop his growing erection from grinding against her buttocks. He couldn't understand why she was doing this, and even less why she would  _ want  _ to do this. Sam was still Samuel, and Samuel's womanizing had been the bane of Elyas' pubescent existence.

 

Had Sam drank more than Elyas had thought? Was that accursed ring perverting her mind along with her body? Or had Elyas simply hit his head in a drunken stupor, and this was all a bizarre fever dream?

 

"You don't have to wait." Sam grabbed Elyas' hand and wrapped the fingers around her throat. "Do whatever you want. No one will know."

 

His guts churned, and he threw Sam off of him. She yelped in surprise as he scrambled over her and rolled out of the wagon. A moment later he was on hands and knees in the grass beside the road, puking up everything that remained of that night.


End file.
